An American Life in Istanbul

This week we have a visitor from Tunis. Yes it is the same person I visited some months ago. If you like, and you speak French you can read about how my previous visit went (at the bare minimum you can look at the pictures):

La Tunisie

Now the Tunisien, Kamel, is here in Istanbul to meet with us, see our company, learn about our products, etc… As I said before, he speaks Arabic and French, and that’s it. I therefore am translating for him.

The first thing about this situation that I want to point out is the irony of the whole thing. Normally Murat and Alper are translating for me from Turkish to English. Today during our meeting, I was translating for them from English to French. This was so much fun. My French is not very good, but being able to translate today made me feel very confident in my ability. All last week I had butterflies in my stomach about how on Earth I was going to talk about technical issues, service, warranty, payment terms, prices, spare parts, stock and all the other things in French. I remember being in Tunis for three days speaking only French and at one point just giving up and telling Kamel I needed to rest for the day. I took my time to call my family just so I could hear some English. I was afraid this would happen again.

I made it through the first two days so far without any problems. Well there were some. I keep forgetting the word for belt (not the kind you wear) and the word for ball bearings. I also am having some difficulty with the words for each piece of the compressor, but that’s what we have hands and fingers for. But in general it wasn’t bad.

Towards the end of the day however, I asked Murat to drive when we made our visits because I said it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to drive and try to speak French. Normally, driving in Istanbul requires a lot of concentration. At this point, he pointed out to me how tired I looked, and I was tired. Speaking and trying to think in French was exhausting after not having practiced for so long. On top of that, translating Alper’s already unclear English was even more exhausting. During the technical overview of the compressor, Ahmet Usta, spoke in Turkish (he doesn’t speak English) to Alper, who spoke in English to me, and then I translated it into French for Kamel. Do you have any idea how hard it is to make sense in French when Alper never understood what Ahmet was talking about in the first place?

Murat of course took pleasure in all of this. From time to time he has told me that he cannot speak English anymore with me. That he is exhausted and wants to just think and speak in Turkish. Now, he said, I understand how he feels. It’s true, I do. Granted it’s much easier for him because he has been speaking and studying in English for at least eight years, but it’s a similar idea. It’s tough to try and communicate in another language that isn’t natural for you. If you cannot think in that language, you are constantly translating everything in your mind into your mother tongue, processing it, creating a response in your mother tongue, and then translating it back to the other language. It’s extremely inefficient and extremely tiring.

So Murat, I feel your pain, but this what we signed up for I suppose.

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