My first shot as an interpreter!

Well, it's not as glam as it sounds....!

Yesterday my successor, Ben (say hello Ben!) arrived on a plane that had to circle for over an hour before plopping down out of a huge cloud at Aomori airport, along with about three dozen other very genki-looking newbie JETs.

Like a lot of other people I've been asked/arranged/conscripted by our Board of Ed to hang around and hand over the job, house, town, in person - and this has included interpreting for our supervisor, bosses, colleages, mayor, and whoever else. It's been a really interesting experience so far - on the one hand I am appalled by some pretty steep vocabularic insufficiencies - having to explain "suspension bridge" as "you know, the bridges with strings" (!! - it is a つり橋 apparently, although quite how we got to that point on self-introduction-day is another story altogether!) and how translating into Tsugaru-ben is doable enough but into regular Japanese - I suck! Ha!

But on the other hand there is a really exciting spontaneous side to it that I never expected my dictionary/textbook/test addicted mind to appreciate. The best thing is when someone cracks a joke, and you manage to interpret it quickly and aptly enough to make the other person laugh before the person who told it in the original language finishes laughing - and then of course the privileged position of being the only one who knows what's going on on both sides is pretty fun. We'll see how the rest of the week goes but maybe I want to be doing this kinda thing a bit more regularly - would certainly be an incentive to study anyway!