I don't loathe interpreted depos with quite the fervor I once did. Gimmie a qualified translator who can simultaneously listen to English while spouting some foreign tongue out the other side of their face and I actually have a better day than usual, since I've got a guaranteed couple seconds during the interpretation to fix the realtime. Most days I'm ready for proofin' once I get home.

All bets are off, though, when I hear those dreaded words, "Well, let's let him answer in English, and if he needs help, then he can ask the translator." Such was the case on day one of four of my Brazilian bankers this week. Luckily the interpreter was highly qualified and spoke right up, informing counsel that if he's under oath to translate, he's gonna do it all or none. I could've kissed him. Problem solved for now.

I only got to ride that high for a few minutes before realizing I was screwed in a way the translator couldn't possibly fix. The witness spoke excellent English but still wanted the questions translated, and counsel had a working knowledge of Portuguese, so they'd kinda go off into their own little world sometimes, leaving everyone else on the sidelines. During rapid-fire questioning, the witness would answer in a mixture of English and Portuguese before the question was half translated, and the attorney would understand the response and move on to his next query.

After a few of these unintelligible exchanges which I so rudely interrupted came this little gem: Counsel wanted me to get what I could of any English the witness may blurt out and then the interpreted answer, if any. My response was that I was absolutely not certified to decide what was or wasn't English coming out of the witness' pie hole, that as long as there's a translator in the room, for purposes of the English language record, the translator is the witness, testifying as to his knowledge what is being said in Portuguese. If it doesn't come outta the interpreter's mouth, it doesn't make it onto my record.

Believe it or not, this actually worked. From that point forward, if counsel darted forward in his questioning before I got a discernible answer, I poked him in the arm and he graciously waited for the translation to catch up.

Monday at lunchtime I was certain I would come back Tuesday morning with a Kalashnikov and make the CNN Headline News crawl by 10:00 a.m., but we were all fast friends by the end of the week. The moral of the story here is stand up for yourself. If someone is impeding your ability to get your record, straighten them out pronto. To hell with the "I am a chair" mantra they taught us in school!

"The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights." - J. Paul Getty