Language and Identity | Ewandro Magalhaes | TEDxBelfort

Over the last 30 years, Ewandro has lent his voice to five Brazilian presidents, two American presidents, and many heads of state and government (Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, the Dalai Lama ... ). He followed them on stage, relayed their words, and analysed their slightest movements, to convey their meanings. As a matter of fact, extracting the meaning of a speaker's speech in order to transpose it into another language is the very essence of his job as a diplomatic conference interpreter. Ewandro is now the Vice President of Communications at KUDO in New York, and has become a reference when it comes to the convergence of language and technology. He has also worked at all levels in the language industry and has thus acquired unique expertise and know-how. Finally, Ewandro is also a writer and career coach. He has published four books that have been translated into several languages. He regularly offers online training courses for conference interpreters for both individuals and groups. He speaks five languages and has lived on three different continents.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

I had prepared this presentation
in a very elaborate way.

I had written a text

and had passed it on
to a professional editor,

so that I could introduce myself
and present my ideas to you

in impeccable French.

But in the end, when I thought about
the theme of this conference this morning,

where we're talking about
the languages of ideas,

that is, ID, the two letters,

our identity,

but also our ideas, what's in our heads,

in the end, I decided not to follow

what I had prepared.

So, I made the decision to throw away
everything I had prepared

and present myself today as I am,

with all my flaws, all my faults,
and some virtues too.

So that poses a problem for you and me

because I don't speak French rigorously.

Let me explain.

It's true that as an interpreter
I don't speak languages badly,

including French.

But interpreters have a very special way
of categorizing languages.

We talk about languages "A", "B", and "C".

And French is, for me,
what we call a passive language,

a "C" language,

a language from which
I am able to interpret,

I am very capable of doing so,

but I never interpret into it

because I don’t really have
complete mastery of it.

So, during this presentation,
I'm going to talk nonsense,

I assure you, OK?

I'll make mistakes,

and if that's the case -

and I can assure you it will be -

please make notes of them,

and, at the end, maybe send me
an email to bring my attention to them.

And based on that, we'll move forward, OK?

OK, so with that, let's get started!

Take a good look at this photo here.

It was taken in Brasilia,
on 17 March 1992.

It was a Tuesday.

It also marks the precise moment
at which I became an interpreter.

But let me go back
and tell you how I got there.

Four years earlier,

I had joined the Brazilian
National Assembly as an employee.

I was bored of filling out paper
eight hours a day.

That day, at the last minute,

someone realized that the prince
didn’t speak Portuguese,

and that we had to find someone
who could do the linguistic mediation.

I was really bored of the job
I was doing at the time,

and I had spread a rumour
that I spoke fluent English.

At some time, I got a phone call.

Two hours later,
I was sitting in that chair

to do the mediation.

There it is!

The gentleman in the light-coloured suit,
his name is Ibsen Pinheiro,

he was, at the time,
the President of the National Assembly.

Across from him at an angle, you see

His Royal Highness Prince Philip,
Duke of Edinburgh.

And the young man between them,
the one with lots of hair, that's me.

(Laughter)

So that's how my career
as an interpreter began.

A few weeks later,

I found myself in front of
the Princess of Thailand.

Another few months and I was pushed
in the deep end, you might say.

And I swam, to my great amazement.

And ultimately, I had the opportunity

to do the mediation
for a number of ambassadors

who came to present
their credentials and all that,

as well as a few heads of state,

including the Dalai Lama,

as well as the gentleman
in the middle, Michel Temer,

who, after a few years,
became the President of Brazil.

So,

that's how I got there

and became the official interpreter

of the National Assembly,

of the President of the National Assembly,

who occasionally was also
the Vice-President of the Republic,

following the fall of President Collor.

There you are.

I eventually quit my job at the congress,

and at some point,
I opened a translation agency

that I ran for 17 years,

and that was called "Die Presse",
like the Austrian newspaper.

A few years later,

I was already a very well
trained interpreter,

and I decided to go to the United States
for further academic training.

And I took a few years
to do a master's degree

at the Monterey Institute in California.

And after about 10 years,

I was appointed chief interpreter
at ITU in Geneva,

a specialized agency of the UN.

So, little by little,
I started to advance,

and that's what made me, you might say,

a more or less competent interpreter.

If you look closely,

you may notice Barack Obama
towards the back of this photo.

There you are.

So, moving on.

Seen from the outside,

simultaneous interpretation
seems like magic.

On the inside, it's pure madness.

You spend your life in a stuffy booth,

with colleagues
you usually know very well,

and you are required to repeat
in a different language

the ideas and words of other people
that you don’t know at all,

keeping the rhythm, the tone,
the intention, the meaning,

as you search for words and documents

as you continue to interpret.

We also need to have
a kind of silent dialogue

with the colleague of the day,

by means of the slightest
of gestures, of glances, of notes,

in order that we can effect our task.

To make matters worse,

we are normally at the end of the room,
on the other side of the room,

normally here, in booths like these,

and we cannot signal
the speaker to slow down,

to interrupt him or her,
or to clarify, and so on.

With so many obstacles,

one might think

simultaneous interpretation
to be an impossible task.

Yet it is perfectly feasible.

It's really a beautiful job,
it's an extraordinary job.

It has given me the opportunity
to go all over the world,

it has brought me into contact with
some really important people,

and it has given me the opportunity
to say, using my own voice,

some very important things
that have gone to form history.

On occasions, perhaps, I've read
in the newspaper the day after a meeting

the exact phrase I used in my language:

it was not the phrase
spoken by the president

because he spoke a different language.

So, sometimes, there are
some very interesting things:

we're really there to make history,

and we're part of it, that's great.

But it's also a job that is sometimes
the source of a lot of frustration.

Above all, it’s the frustration
of spending an entire professional life

expressing other people's ideas.

We use our voice, our gestures,
everything we have, to communicate well,

not to give expression to what we feel
and what we want to say,

but rather to do it for other people.

There is also this false
sense of belonging,

since one day I am there,

right next to the president,
other members too, with the king,

but after the lights have gone out,
I am just the interpreter.

And sometimes that messes
with our heads a bit.

Some colleagues have
certainly had difficulty

taking this aspect of our profession
into consideration.

So, at some point you start
asking yourself the question:

Why?

Why devote yourself to it?

Why do this job full of difficulties?

Why spend your whole life

in such a complicated way

that precludes self-expression and so on?

And at a certain point,
you start to feel a level of anxiety

that increases without
your knowing exactly why.

At the same time
as one becomes an interpreter,

a better one, more competent and so on,

at the same time -
what was true for me anyway -

was that I constantly had this feeling
of not really being there,

as if I were just an invisible voice,

and that I wasn't - if you will -

I wasn't fulfilled.

So, at a certain point,
I began asking myself the question:

Why do I feel this way?

Why the anxiety?

I've been doing this for years, why?

And so at that point, I was an interpreter
very little sure of myself.

And this bothered me.

So I started asking myself
the question: Why?

In Portuguese, the word for "why"
forms a question, but also a reply.

We use the same word:

it's not like in English,
where we have "why" and "because".

In Portuguese, we say "por que",

and the reply is also "porque" -
we just write it slightly differently.

At a certain point, I realized
that "why" may also be the best answer,

and not just the best question.

It's a lesson I learned
from another interpreter,

a very famous interpreter,
but a different kind of interpreter.

His name is Vido Santiago.

And if his name doesn't
mean anything to you,

maybe it's time you got to know Vido.

He is a virtuoso saxophonist,

and he has travelled all over the world
to blow into his saxophone.

He has played with all the singers
on the international scene.

He has been invited to all
the jazz festivals on the planet.

We're very close because I married
his sister about 30 years ago.

(Laughter)

So, one day, I was
at my mother-in-law's house,

and we started talking.

I asked him,

"Vido, you often go up
in front of thousands of people,

how do you control
the fear of going on stage?

Is it something you suffer from?"

He said, "No, I don't.

But I have a very strict ritual."

He started to tell me everything he does,

and at the end, he told me that
every time before going on stage,

he takes a minute to think it all over,

to do ... erm ... a sort of meditation ...

and so on ...

... and to pray well.

And for me, it was a real surprise

that, after so many years
of tours and so on,

someone like Vido followed this routine,

found it necessary to do it and so on.

And I kept asking him the question:

But why, and what do you do
that gets you past it?

He said,

"As soon as you know
why you're doing something,

anxiety disappears,

it vanishes completely.

You need to ask yourself the question.”

And then he began
to give me some examples.

He gave me four examples.

He said, "Among musicians,
there are some colleagues

who play from emotional anger.

They are angry because
they suffer discrimination,

whether it's some form of harassment,
sexually, or because of their age,

or whatever else.

And so when they go on stage,
they carry with them that anger,

and they use that emotion
to take revenge against the world.

And the result is undeniably good music.

There are also some colleagues
who do it from emotional vanity.

They have such a degree of insecurity

that it forces them
to go on stage and do their best,

so that, at the end,
they receive applause,

and, in that way,
gain their self-confidence.

There are also a few others

who play because they realize

that, in fact, they should be
doing something else.

By saying that they're there,
they're playing as a form of avoidance.

That is, perhaps my body
is no longer there,

and I should be doing something else,

but secretly they fear
they are not good enough,

so they keep playing.

There are a few, like me,
for example, who play,

or do what we do,

as a way of giving pursuit to
someone else that we admire

in order to gain
their admiration or affection.

That was my case at the beginning

with regard to my father."

There it is.

At some time, he said to me,

"I've gone through
all these kinds of emotions,

and in the end, whenever I realized
that I was at a certain level,

I sought to go forward yet further.

So I went through all that,
and today I'm playing because one day -

I remember it very well,
when I was a kid -

I went to a concert,
and I left completely changed

because of one note I heard.

It completely changed my life,

and that's why I play the saxophone.

So, today, I've reached
the level of compassion,

and that's the emotion that makes me play.

And so, as far as I'm concerned,
what I'm trying to do

is to play to transform.

Because in any crowd,

on any day,

there is at least one person
who is ready to be changed.

And I pray for that person
to be there and leave changed."

There you are.

At that point, I started
to put questions to myself.

And maybe you could
in doing whatever you do

ask yourself them too.

I'm not here to give you advice,
but some suggestions, maybe.

And the questions are these:

Why do you do what you do?

You need to answer that question
in a very honest way.

And what is it that really motivates you?

Ultimately, if you find
that the emotion is not the right one,

what could you do to leave it behind

and maybe move on to another emotion

that perhaps will give you
the desire or the energy

to do the things you do
from that different emotion

that is in fact greater than you
and not totally centred on you.

And finally, for whom do you play?

Because as an interpreter,
one reminds oneself very often

of the fact that
every time I centre on myself,

if I then miss the odd phrase,

I'll reproach myself for it,
and lose the next one on top of it.

If I applaud myself because, yes,
I understood that, well done me,

I will then lose what comes next.

So, as an interpreter one learns

that to do this job well,

you have to forget yourself,
and focus your attention on someone else.

Maybe you need to find
someone else to focus on

to do your job better.

So, these are two difficult questions,

and the answers may elude you for a while.

But asking them, and acting on
the insights gained thereby,

is the only way to continue to advance.

Pending that,

perhaps you could try certain aspects
of the Vido Santiago routine.

That is, take a minute to recall exactly

the real reason you find yourself
in your job or wherever.

Beyond the interpreting booth,

or the stage,

there are so many discoveries to make,

dreams to realize,

fantasies about to fall apart.

All you need to do is to play
a note precisely with emotion,

or to pronounce a word
with compassion and in a precise way,

and every day, in whichever crowd,

there is at least one person
ready to be changed.

I hope that person is listening today.

I hope you are that person.

Thank you.

(Applause)