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:
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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