I am fast becoming a disciple of Flow. I believe I have referred to it elsewhere in these articles as "muscle memory". Now, having read up on facts due to a rogue podcast I stumbled on, I prefer this definition. It carries a sustained rather than an only reactive connotation which I feel matches the true experience. The facts I will spare you, not only because I am still digesting them and frankly they are not entirely in my possession yet, but mainly because it is a bad habit to develop a habit and then a theory to justify it. It happens with coffee and chocolate, say. First you drink/eat it, then you look up the unfailingly scientific article on why it's good for you.
There is one other reason: I know Flow, I'm sure it's there. Any explanation is no doubt of interest, but unnecessary.
Heaven forbid my yielding to the temptation of juxtaposing academia and real life. It is true however to say that most of the training we receive as language professionals is classroom-based, and whilst helpful and indeed essential, scholarly reflections are rarely the reason we like the job or why we choose to learn about it in the first place. 
If we are honest, the first spark - the one we constantly try to re-create - is that sudden projection of the nerves towards a pitch of reactivity; the rush of endorphin-powered availability of words in the brain; the highs and the lows displacement and dissociation creates; the steady anaesthetic descent into a realm where our bodies no longer hurt; the awareness of oneness with the machines enhancing us; time standing still as we impeccably link up a sequence of perfect choices...in short, we are slaves to Flow.
Maybe you give it another name. Or maybe you really actually do do it all differently, and I'm alone in my world. That's fine, really, I can cope, and I'll read about my mistakes on the other blogs. Now, back to mine.
And my reasons to share: first, I like to note how all my own apprentices over the years have been trying to acquire this trick of the trade more than others. Second, I see that light in my fellow wanderers, simply we don't talk about it because it's a language they don't teach us at school.
And why should it matter? Well, because this is our experience, and our life. And because we suffer chronically from providing a service without an experience (I generalise, but do we never ever learn from the CEOs we have to translate?), whereas we all need to transfer just that to those we care for professionally. I know the latter must be a good reason for someone to employ a communicator, rather than the sad reality that one is incompetent at languages. In a mature consumer society needs are wants.  My client's money can harness this energy, which is different to buying an automated software (yes, it will come about!). This is powerful.
To press the point further let me suggest a backchaining approach: what do we do all this for? Allow me to exclude the mirage of money and the triviality of travel from the conversation. Is it the noble goal of enabling communication? That of uniting the world by promoting cultural understanding? Or perhaps forwarding business deals and helping the economy? Yeah, me too - and I mean it! But that is the destination, not the fuel burning up inside of you as you fly.
Shall we try the other question then: what makes you bear it all?
Before this it seems to me that all the higher codified arguments fall out of focus, diseased as we are with the how and having obliterated the crucial why. This is where vision blurs.  
Which is fine, as now I want you to close your eyes and just let go...

Two years ago I was given an e-book reader. No, I did not fall in love with it at first sight, but it was nice. Stereotypes are not welcome on these pages, but I must admit I started asking all the usual questions about a non-paper format. I shall not list them, another unwelcome ill of our times. More than anything, I began to talk to people, as pioneers do...my relationship with paper had already taken a turn for the journey whence no one returns since the discovery of the Smartpen and sim-consec - you must ask me to talk about that some time. Paper is good, witness one very small part of my origami production.

I started questioning, I say. The dialogue was something like this:

Interlocutor: I could never live without paper books
Martin: Why?
I: Well, you can touch them
M: You can touch a Kindle...
I: Yes, but that is bad for your eyes
M: No, opticians have decreed there is a better resolution, no curvature...
I: Yes yes, but a real book is different, you can write notes on it
M: You can do the same with an e-reader
I: But what about the smell?

Well, this took me a moment. I felt I was floundering. Then one day, I found a solution! I went back to my man, but was not taken as seriously as I had honestly taken him.
Ok, I'll stop. But what he should have said is just "I like paper books", and that cannot and should not be argued with.

This is not about the superiority of the electronic versus the traditional. And I know there is a copyright issue after the owner's death as for music, but I do not want that card played here, or I shall play the Amazon one, and I mean the Forest with all the trees. And please back off if you are about to launch the cannonball of tradition, or I will hit you with my chemical warfare.

So what makes me so iconoclastic, and why did this find its way on an albeit skewed interpreting blog?

Well, here is the logic: an interpreter is itinerant, or at least does not usually work from home (yet); and books are portable if you are reading one or two novels on your flight (and you don't even need to switch them off on departure), but reference books - the ones we really need for our job - are less so; and they need to be bought, as you cannot normally borrow them from a library; and even if you do decide to carry them, they are clumsy to use, noisy in the booth, and incredibly slow to refer to (I calculate that the useful search time is one second - after that I will start to paraphrase). You see?

So what could I do with the inevitable bigger and better paper collection I already own? I cast my mind back to the first PC I got. There was nothing on it of course, and my life already too complex to re-format. Until I bought a scanner. And now I knew I had it! Unsolicited, though with their knowledge, I am devoting the present post to these guys:
​

I will not introduce their products here, suffice it to say that if you wish your books will be returned to you without a scratch. But I have selected another option. There is not one where the book is actually returned to you in ash form in an urn, but I like the symbolic choice of having to break the book's backbone, suck out the marrow, and receive a pile of loose leaves, along with a whole host of (fully searchable) digital files. It is, I feel, a sublimation, an assumption into The Pantheon of Tomes, a rewarding and rightful de-materialized destiny.

And if I forget to charge my battery on the night, I can still just take to the conference the few pages of a glossary or topic compendium I need...
...to keep on keepin' on.

I increasingly feel we are obsessed with outcome-based behaviours. The bottom line. All things, in one word only, teleological. So what's the problem now, you may ask?  Well, let us imagine we come across a wad of banknotes as we walk to work. Nothing wrong with a little unexpected bonus, of course. But we wouldn't leave our job in order to comb the streets to increase the chance of that happening again...or would we?  Put more subtly, do those rare occasions in which our conference is cancelled but we get paid anyway entice us to hope this may happen again? And is it right? Could praying for easy speakers who also supply a text become a habit? I just cannot imagine a colleague as un-cool as one who actually feels sorry the challenge is taken away by these little advantages yet I believe care needs to be exercised. Well, no matter right now, I'm going to change the subject. Only slightly. I used "teleological" at a job once, and was reprimanded by a colleague: these guys are just regular folks, he said, they don't understand what you are on about. Our job is to transmit a clear message. Sure. But that was the message - in fact the very word - in the source language. The speaker had decided rightly or wrongly to use it, either because she thought the audience would get it, or because she actually wanted to come across as sophisticated, superior, intellectual, obscure, whatever... So now I'm entitled to decide how clever listeners are, and how articulate the speaker is. And to shine a light on what in my...interpretation...was not meant to be bright. Again, I get worried. And this time it's not one of my conservative policies against acronyms or company-speak (read back for that, there's plenty of it).  Just to be transparent: if Mr Speaker wants me to take him down a notch, or to sound like an Italian who knows English so well he has forgotten his Italian, or for me to interpret backwards like a subliminal message from a Stones' record, I'm at your service. I'll do most things it says in my contract, and more. But this is different. It's a bit like those enlightened travellers who choose a cheap and cheerful hotel, and then feel the need to enhance it and prove they have seen better by complaining about most of the experience.  The vulgar equalization of it all, just because you cannot judge a restaurant from the outside by its livery, or worse because you can't keep up with a register hitherto unknown is to be frowned upon, and probably dangerous in a continent such as Europe where too many people speak too many languages badly. We should serve, I agree, but as mentioned elsewhere, with proficiency. Perhaps said register could become a direction of study - probably a more fruitful one than spending time oversimplifying already simple messages which, quite simply, don't want to be simplified - yes? Sorry. I meant: what is behind words must be part of the message, and that is what we have to deal with. The unspoken interpretation is often neglected, always underrated. Not what she said, but what would she say if she knew the language like I should?  Am I entitled to make this interpretation? Well, at least as much as the one my colleague advocated above.  Am I going to be worthy of a Speaker's steel? Or just hiding and hoping for that free stash of cash?  Not game. It's a pirate's life for me...

I never did like short forms of language. Mind you, I can clearly see why they keep coming about. I remember when sms functionality happened in my youth. The point was of course to save money, and naturally I immediately invested the same amount on a txt dictionary, the first of its kind. Few people then (and now) realised that the incompleteness, the terseness and the speed of the exchanges made for what is in fact an oral language in written form, if you see what I mean, hence the need for body language, i. e. emoticons - some of my learners who still read me will recall my enthusiasm in class. But acronyms! That's a different kettle of fish. A more subtle aroma, though I am pushing my metaphors. Here, we are peddling added value. You do not need examples, but it is easy to see how KPI-toting executives are not trying to be parsimonious in terms of breath usage. Rather, they are keeping that necessary step ahead, the millisecond it will take you to decode the spec which is really the gulf between the world made of easy ideas your kids, your old parents and a prosaic plethora of simpletons surrounding you force you to live with and the sleek clickable clipped sharpness of the man who knows exactly who he is.
The temptation cannot be resisted: you will sneer in disgust at the artificiality of it all only to champion it when your turn is due. And here it comes, the  BQ (big question): why should I care? Well, for one I just can't forget that language professionals are not only followers, but are called to be trendsetters in their field. Translators have always been, and they have historically more often than not become literary giants in their own right. Why not other practitioners?  Then there is the argument that the prosodic features really also entail stuff like sound and function, the ripe fruit of which is more than just a message getting across. How can you love a town or a country which is hypertextually atrophied, or a woman whose name your cannot taste in a rosary of syllables? Moving swiftly away from Latin spirit, here's my line: words are a bridge, not a cool accessory. Sure, even an edifice must have a style, but its peculiarity still cannot fall short of general appreciation, or we are back to the carbonari and their secret codes. Diversity is surely an asset, but fragmentation is a limit, and originality at all costs vulgar. A skilled craftsman may produce works of beauty using traditional tools and techniques - the newness is in the concept, the unit of meaning. An artist employing at once exclusively new implements, hitherto-unknown methods and unheard-of messages is to be viewed with suspicion. Never trust what is too recent only for novelty's sake, the Romans used to say, and their language may now be tricky to decode for some, but it retains its charm beyond meaning, like a middle-aged true lady who finds a half light more flattering now, yet  still evoking a dream of lust evolving from the shadows exactly through that subdued brightness. How did I get talking of things Latin again? Silly me, I got lost in another aimless promenade, in a...fruitless undertaking chasing...credibility. I was going to say kudos, but I will refrain. Just in case the above expression acquires some academic dignity and becomes cleft and re-assembled. This Frankenstein soundbite could not hope to live. XOXOXOXO

Such is the language the great Oz employs to empower those approaching him to seek his advice. Three empty beings from the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. And it works. He is able to make them whole by maieutically eliciting what force lies within them. But you know the story. So where have I been? Keeping busy, perhaps, but also keeping my promise. I remember once reading an article about the only newspaper circulating in the most remote island of Tristan Da Cunha. As the number closed, it would always bear the following: the next edition will be printed in the coming week if there is any news. Since I have no obligation to provide a regular front page for a paying readership, I have the privilege not to have to flatten real news against non-news simply to meet the deadline. And it has been dead: the polemic on machine assisted virtualization has died down, the various criminal justice systems and universities are nearly on holiday language-wise, and the big boys...well I suppose they've been busy too. So why do I pick up my keyboard? I'm worried. I've had more and more work which has required of me to learn a metalanguage. Company-speak, a lesson in vocabulary geared at promoting products. And why is this wrong? As a person who makes his money selling words, I should be less concerned than most. But look here: there is a trend among patients which entails going to a doctor to tell the practitioner in question what's wrong with you and how you should be healed. So why don't we do it ourselves? Well, it helps to have someone take the blame if things go wrong. The same happens in restaurants, fashion outlets, hotels...the customer is king - and the expert service provider is a mere executor acting rather passively and in a perfunctory way, with the added problem that s/he might be called to account when everyone ends up with egg on their face. Can we change any of this then? Well, probably not the world, but we could do ourselves up a bit. I shall call it serving with mastery. Think of it: rather than reluctantly kowtowing to illiterate projects involving language (no offence: it's just not their job sometimes) let us begin to respectfully lead, to everyone's advantage. Crazy? Well, I think it's what Apple Corporation did, not ten years ago, and it seemed to work for them. We're not Apple, some say. Clearly not then, I would agree. Does  it work for me? Yes! Not always, but often enough to share here. I get it right when I can shift my brain away from the worry that they are going to blame me, or from the laziness that too much business can bring about. And the result can be empowering. Which brings us neatly back to the Wizard. Who was he? Not a good wizard, by his own admission, yet not a bad man. Just a man. With a megaphone. A bit like all of us, a bit like me now if you are reading this through the Facebook link (gotcha!). He is saved because he embraces change, and never suffers any inferiority complex. He returns home. Now I'd like to tell you where my home is professionally, but I just don't know. Kansas lies far away, in the great Country whose motto is the title you have no doubt recognised. Academically, I spent a little time in a place called Wisdom (La Sapienza university, Rome), but not enough to acquire residency, for too many reasons. But that motto stuck too: Il futuro è passato qui. I suppose my time warp began then, as well as other twists. It takes a linguist to correctly translate the future was once here. It takes respectful leadership and passionate proficiency to steer the mind away from the dangerous the future is the past, here. Which would you pay for? End of homily. Amen. I'll see you wayfarers on the road.

During these busier days of the year I am enjoying the organic silence in the blogosphere. This should not be misinterpreted: I like the company of fellow bloggers. I learn from those whom I choose to follow, and at the very worst those who I do not but turn up on my radar anyway helpfully convey that much needed quality which I, for one, lack: the ability to rank order and prioritise. What? Anything, it seems. Listing is now a literary genre. A useful one in my book.

It is perhaps funny and even suspicious that the great polemic threads of our professional times seem to go to sleep when everyone is snowed under with work, but the world of politics has taught us the use of the silly season, so it is certainly not a novelty. But the axiom "the more I work the less I take an interest in the profession" seems to be that very idea under a topsy-turvy guise. Luckily, it is not the object of this post.

What I have set out to explore here is the qualities of the information we decide to dwell on as professionals in our exchanges. Terse, practical, well thought out and clinically proven.
In one of my other lives I had the opportunity to teach, in a range of settings. The list above smacks of that experience. And yet, I could not help feeling at the time and all the time that the schedule was not complete. I tried hard to transmit that impalpable extra to my learners. Results were good, but I did not have the ability nor the tools to systematize such knowledge. Criticism ensued. I was not getting it wrong, they told me, but somehow there was danger in supplying unexpected and maybe unreplicable content. What if it was later required of colleagues? What if an inspection demanded a break-down of the rationale? Lastly, what if the outcome was damaging or at best untraceable in students' minds? I put down my guns, more than once, and not so light-heartedly as I would have done had it been a mere ideological dispute - my income and family welfare were at stake. I walked into the sunset not even becoming that genial martyr it would have been cool to become.

Now, as I broadcast from the underbelly of the establishment at safety deph, I have finally put my finger on it. I don't really care if it sounds trivial. And may not worry about whether it is right, as I know it works for me, I can feel it in my bones. It is the long neglected, academically besmirched concept of muscle memory. Drills. Mindless mechanical repetition, seducing information and logic into a controlled sleep, so that the state of mind we (I, at least ) best operate in can be elicited. Not an absence, but a suspended presence. Right behind our speaker, right on top of our technology, feeling every move of the machine, anticipating every turn of someone else's neurons. The long hours of preparation make sense, the meditation, the diet, the wheeling and dealing, the vision...it all comes together, yet never as we had pictured it in our finely tuned minds clouded by well-tempered claviers...

All this will I fear remain unteachable to student-clients. This is the stuff of an apprentice - and I know at least one is reading. It is not perhaps the product of universities, but hopefully for one person on these pages it is the matter of life - and now stands a chance of keeping them going - and me too. Everything else is respectfully complementary, and still as necessary as air and breathing. Which however cannot, as we have said elsewhere, be the object of life. Breathing is but a background, albeit a crucial one. A condition on which stage our true persona is enacted.

Back to darkness now, into the night. Words build houses, some beliefs recite, but meaning is more than the summation of the words. Forget the bricks and mortar for a moment. Train so as to build, not to dissect. Walk onto your stage, a bundle of muscle memory. What will you be?
This one's for you.

Whether wholeheartedly or not, when acquaintances react with the "lucky you! In sunny Spain again" attitude following my accounts of the working weekend as part of a perfunctory school-run exchange, I don't like to dust it off with an equally overused "well, just business, mainly airports and hotels, you know" spiel. Though technically true of course, I find it in sour grape taste and not a real portrayal of the way I feel. It is surely an exact description, because I do not in fact see or do anything I could not see or do at home. But travelling is not about checking out with your own eyes what you knew existed all along. There is something about being, as ever the essence of these pages of mine. I do not possess the ability to dissect my idea of genius loci for you, but I have found it well summed up in Alain De Botton's The Art of Travel: you move from place to place despite yourself, you being the most cumbersome piece of luggage weighing your own self down. Travelling used to be a luxury, especially in business terms. The name still adorns a Class of its own. In my father's generation's case for example, life back at the office would continue as usual protecting absent staff from deluge on return, the scant communication resources would ensure lots of respectful quiet, and of course the mission was rewarded with a salary over and beyond standard, since the idea of performing away from home was extra-ordinary.
I won't bore you with a description of how things have changed, but do note this: it is at least amusing that in our current predicament it is stability, not mobility, which is rewarded. Let us pick some random examples. Whether it's dealing with quarrelsome neighbours, hoping for some respect at your local restaurant, getting a convenient broadband deal or simply asserting your right to park somewhere, the stable dwellers always win, and the passer-by soon gives up any claim as the time needed to follow anything up is lacking. The commercial reasons behind this are of course obvious, but what is less remembered and understood is that it was not always like this. The outcome is a demographically significant wave of movers who at all costs wish their companions to know how stable (respected) they are (at home, i. e. somewhere else). This takes on strange forms. On occasion it is the type who clearly does not live or eat in five-star surroundings complaining like a rockstar in a six-star environment; it might be the tourist just emerging from the foggy north grumbling at one single cloud one single day of her holiday; or even the call-of-the-wild explorer appalled at the level of English spoken in the jungle he has chosen to lose himself in. The list goes on, outwardly varied, but featuring one unmistakable quality: we are still lugging ourselves around. This is where I find the previously evoked airports and hotels come in handy. As non-places, they are cleansing to our system. They resist modification, in fact defy us in terms of leaving a mark, and suddenly we are relieved of all responsibility. I have tried Christmas, New Year and birthdays in such twilight zones - never through my own choice - and have made the most of what I had, finding it rather soothing, since being in transit is, I find, the most correct of life's metaphors.
No affectation intended, but the device where dreams reside is more than a tourist adaptor. A herioc perspective is the realistic way to house any everyday action, strange as it may seem. As a new Blues People, discovering the road as a home - once destinations are mapped out by those who inevitably control us - may represent the most subversive form of liberation since the first generation set out, troubled but free, from the Delta to the Big City.

​As I write I feel a sense of impending failure in trying to respond to a colleague's request: do a post on the different kinds of shaving cream interpreters use. You know, the nitty gritty - he said one day.
I have put it off long enough, and as professional friends are thin on the ground and I can't afford any more of this haemorrage, here goes.
For being an age where essentials have so much momentum, we are certainly obsessed with detail. Even the plural form of the word sounds like a problem. I naturally confess I have not been immune. From these very pages I have portrayed scenarios where "the website makes the man" and secretly - as must be - I acquiesce in the face of clear marching orders from a range of sources.
Some come from the ladies in my life. Let's see...avoid beard trimming too close to mujaheddin protocol; jeans in boots only if your  name is Jack Sparrow; any leather tucked inside said boots only if it is Keith Richards; going back to captains, airline pilots make a lot of money, which entitles them and them only to wear a tie with a short-sleeved shirt; shorts are for scouts and little boys...the list goes on, and it has been helpful over the years. The same trends are reflected on social media and advice fora, but again I have had a dig at them from elsewhere on this platform.
The thing about following instructions, for example directions on a GPS device, is that you are really following the device and not the road. Even when these two coincide (and she is not in the car) they are not the same, and this is important.
Because it is all about that crucial discrimination between make up and mask we have evoked (yes, on these pages). Whereas a surgeon's knife slices when we are asleep, and we really have not the required knowledge to make *informed choices about our appearance, applying cosmetic foundation is in fact a beautifying action from the inside: we learn to look at ourselves, we touch, we feel, we perfect. We accept, appreciate and love.
What does that all mean? Well, look at it this way. The article you are reading could have been written long ago and the author now be pushing up daisies, having set a timing device to this day for its publication. The result would be the same. But not the process. Which is where caring resides.
We play a lot with new forms of survival in these turbulent times. What won't change is that someone whose existence means focussing only on the bottom line will and can not be different in other domains of life. There is only one true soul in the human tree.
We can wear different clothes, but what drives us deep down is not endowed with an on/off switch. Or should I have two Facebook accounts, one for each face? Well, there's something in that... Survival is not mere presence. And though the gusts can be bitter, we still have a choice as to how we deal with this fact. Turn windward. Wear your colours on your countenance. Apply generously and evenly. Such is the one and only emulsion of life. Now you are ready for the blade.