Chinese Novels Short Stories Collection

Simulcasting Love - Chapter 1

Century Convention Center.  Where the G2 Summit conference was convening.

Chairman: “The convening of this conference marks the formal establishment between our two countries in a strategic cooperative partnership …...”

In every large international conference, simultaneous translators are always needed.  This is one of the highest paid professions in the world.  It is also one of the most difficult and challenging profession.  It requires the translator to translate speech into another language simultaneously while the speaker is speaking.  It challenges their reaction time, foundations of each language, and quick thinking.  The pay from a job like this is difficult for regular people to achieve.  The salary of a first-rate simultaneous translator is $750 per hour.  For a conference of this importance, they can be paid more than $3,000 a day.  This is also a battlefield without any smoking guns.  There was a simultaneous translator who had mistranslated the word “regret” to “apology” once.  It caused the mutual relationship of two countries to fall into a tense situation.  It caused the Memorandum of Understanding to be postponed for one month.  The translator resigned in frustration and became depressed.  It was said that he later fell ill and passed away.

Is there a translator who isn’t always treading on thin ice with a high degree of stress?  Isn’t the brain of the convention’s host full of tensed nerves, taut like a tight string that would not be relieved until the convention is over?  This is because a job like this is full of uncertainty.  In addition, because the translators use their human brain, not computer, they can still make mistakes.  Experienced translators can quickly recover from their mistakes.  When the mistake was an unrecoverable error, then the result could be disastrous.

But, this city’s large international conference hosting organization was relieved, because they hired a “treasured” translator, who other translators called “God Solomon”[1], a genius of simultaneous translations.

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“……partner relationship……”Tang Shuoran quickly translated the Chairman’s words.  The Chairman’s script had already been sent to the translator team a day earlier.  Translating with a script available was like an appetizer dish to him.  So his voice sounded a little lazy.  You know, the biggest challenge were the unexpected tricky questions from the audience.  At this time, if a word was very difficult to translate directly, most translators would use a technique: translation by meaning.  But it would never happen to Tang Shuoran, because he had memorized 100,000 English words and idioms.  He could very arrogantly announce to anyone, that the words he translated were the most accurate.

After the script had been received, the staff carefully asked Tang Shuoran: “Should somebody read and record it, then you could go home to study it?

Tang Shuoran waved his hand: “Just the usual way.”

The staff dared not speak any more on the matter.  They had a young girl in the team who had the most unaccented Mandarin to read each word and sentence aloud at a middling pace.

Tang Shuoran looked at the distant blankly.  It seemed like he was listening, but he also seemed to be in deep thought.

This young girl had been hired by Tang Shuoran after he had interviewed her.  He said if there was no good reader available in the team, then he would not accept the job offer.  The conference organizer was terrified. Though this request was very unreasonable (the hiring of organizer’s staff was decided by a translator who was an employee of the organizer), they agreed regardless.  The conference organizer was lucky to have agreed to his request.  Hiring a good translator was easy, but it was very rare to find a genius translator.