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)