NOTE: THIS IS AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED TRANSCRIPT. WE'RE WORKING ON A PROPER VERSION.


54: Interpreting in zones of conflict and crisis

Alex G: Welcome to the Troublesome Terps, the podcast about the things that keeps interpreters up at night and somebody who wasn't kept up tonight is Jonathan Downie from Scotland, where everything is quiet and sleeping. Isn't that right, Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yeah, it seems like for some reason everyone decided to go to sleep, it must have been the change of clock recently. No, there could not be Troublesome Terps with the only Troublesome Terps host who has been on every single episode, the man himself, our editor in chief or organizer in the Alex Drechsel.

Alex D: Good evening, everyone. Good to see you all. Yeah, it's good bragging rights, the only one being on all the episodes. But thank God I'm the guy who has to record everything.

Antonio: Yeah, well, that now you can take this acronym with you, Alexander [00:01:00] PDF, OCU, that's a fine occupational qualification. You've been every episode.

Alex D: Exactly. Speaking of qualifications, we have a qualified industry researcher with us, which is the wonderful Sarah Hickey. Good evening, Sarah.

Sarah: Hey, everyone, good to be here today, we're going to talk about a particularly troubling topic and that is interpreting in conflict zones and crisis regions. We all know that interpreting is taxing enough as it is. But interpreters working in these conditions take it to a whole new level, one who has a lot of experience in this area. As our special guest today, Antonio Pasada. Welcome, Tony.

Antonio: Hello, how are

Alex G: Ipad

Antonio: You? How are

Alex G: Pro.

Antonio: You, sir?

Sarah: Yeah, good to have you with us, maybe

Antonio: Great to be here.

Sarah: We can kick this off and you can tell us a little bit about your yourself, your your background [00:02:00] as an interpreter.

Antonio: Well, you could call me the reluctant interpreter, because it's always been a question of somebody noticing the gift and me saying, yeah, whatever, I'll get to it and start it up with my father. And then he was like my first mentor. He was a polyglot and then the headmaster of a school where I finished high school, who was also another polyglot. And and they they noticed something. I eventually was very shy about my Spanish because I had grown up in South Dakota and I didn't I didn't speak Spanish. My father wanted to learn English really well. So I never spoke Spanish at home, which was really absurd when I came back to Columbia. Have you been born here? Everybody in school called me Gringo. My brother and I have a younger brother. We were both the gringos to this day and I ended up going to school in Canada and USB-C and I studied Spanish. [00:03:00] So. So that's that's that's where I got started. And throughout my career, which spans 30 odd years or something, I've lost count. I always fell into things which which is perhaps something that you were thinking of asking. I don't know how how do I get into this? And I just I would fall into things. When I first got into school, it was an all boys school. And that was a new thing for me because I'd never gone to an all boys school. I went to public school in South Dakota. And and over here was an all boys school, like very European in style. And the only point of communication was the pop songs of the day. Classmates who had no no patience for me found that I could translate the words to the songs of the day. And in those days it BJ's and.

Alex D: Cue some soundtrack music right here,

Alex G: Yeah.

Antonio: Right. [00:04:00]

Sarah: The.

Alex D: Families

Antonio: Yeah, there's a lot of if

Alex D: State election.

Antonio: There is a lot of bugs, and then and then some of the some of the more sensitive spirits went for Cat Stevens. So I found myself I found myself training psych translation, translating song lyrics. And then and then I started I started moving into into translating or interpreting because of need. My father would just, like, lasso me in to help him out with a client. I pick a one of my father's clients up at the airport or I'd help out doing like legal translations because he was an attorney. And and then from there on, it just became a question of translating or interpreting when it suited me, which meant that it interested me, that it allowed me to to scratch an itch I had if it was something interesting that I would do it. And it was only in the last actually 20 years that [00:05:00] I just went full in. And and and this is what I do, you know, that this is what I do. I do a lot of text. I do. We have a little company, a little service company here in Bogota. We do a lot of like massive text projects, you know. Eight hundred thousand words in ten, fifteen day delivery. We put together teams in four or five countries. Forty people will take and we'll do OCR and DTP on on text so that we can process through through the usual tools people have, whether it's trade shows or work fast or whatever. And then the interpretation simply came from that. What's the biggest business in the country, what's the biggest client in the country, you end up working for that for that 800 pound gorilla, no pun intended, because we're going to talk about gorillas of different [00:06:00] kinds. And in Colombia,

Alex D: Or foreshadowing,

Antonio: It's.

Alex D: Tony, what would you say is that is the percentage of of translation and interpreting in in your sort of for your business. And is that more or less representative of your market, sort of in terms of the share of both?

Antonio: Hard to say, I think in my case, during covid times, interpreting has has gotten bigger.

Alex D: Hmm, interesting.

Antonio: Simply because people

Alex G: It's gotten

Antonio: See,

Alex G: Bigger, that's interesting.

Antonio: Yes, it's gotten bigger, it's gotten bigger because a lot of clients who were not into doing on site events suddenly found that they had no, no, no meetings, no travel, no nothing. And they had they had to allow people in their organizations to to to sit in on meetings and they needed interpretation. So it's gotten pretty, pretty crazy. [00:07:00] I've I've you know, normally I would I would have maybe an event a week. And nowadays, I'll have I'll have things like every day and sometimes stuff overlapping, I'll start a two hour event in the morning and I'll do a four hour event in the afternoon with a different client. We had an event with the with I forget the name. It's an international organization. They run a I'll look it up. They run a an event on intellectual property at Columbia was hosting this year and they were going to host it in a really nice city in the Caribbean, got the hang up and they had to cancel and they canceled flights. I said it's too important, we need to do this event. So they did it remotely. It was a five day event with Portuguese, Spanish and English and people from all over the world, of course. So that was that [00:08:00] was pretty brutal because that week I also had three other events.

Antonio: So I couldn't be in in in in all places at the same time. So we had to get in, put together a team of like nine people and we would rotate depending on expertize or whatever. But it's been it's been really crazy. I've been very surprised by how massive it's become. And since I do a lot of text, that's one of the things I've always been very inclined on my private side, I'm inclined towards like literature, history, I like a lot of economics. But on my like more client side, I've always been involved in tech. I started out in medicine, but I didn't really like doctors that much and the environment in medical conferences for real. And I ended up going to tech because, you know, tech in general, it could have been I work I work for Procter and Gamble. And there are plants, [00:09:00] you know, installing when they're installing new equipment with all the oil companies in Colombia. I think very few that I haven't worked with and and then with with computer companies and with that kind of technology, computer technology, which and those those two those two strands are the ones that have that have put me and in harm's way in certain moments.

Alex G: So, I mean, you've

Antonio: It's.

Alex G: Already alluded pretty much to it. So how exactly did you end up working in these, like, dangerous? I wouldn't I don't know if you would call it conflict zones or crisis regions, but like in these more dangerous environments, is it due to some of those clients or just the market that you're based in is you know, if you're going out into the field working with the clients is any more dangerous than, I don't know, for example, in in Europe, do you think so? What would you what would you say?

Antonio: Well, you know, that's that's an interesting [00:10:00] question, because what is a conflict zone when we talk about a conflict zone, I start thinking about Columbia and I'm thinking, OK, let's let's look at 60 years of history. Bottom line is that this is a country that has always been in conflict. It's different in terms of of the linguists that work in like Iraq or Afghanistan or things like that, which feed a kind of a kind of like a a morbid interest in the press or even the general, because you're you're embedded with soldiers and you might be going from door to door looking for rebels or whatever, and these guys end up getting shot and killed. A lot of times they get they get left hung out to dry by by occupying forces a lot of times, if not most of the time over here, it's different. [00:11:00] Over here, you tend to fall into it because you're lulled into a false sense of security because you're living in a city like Bogota. Voters got maybe whatever, nine million people. It's a modern city. Got it. You've got good restaurants, whatever. But you might find that a 30 minute flight away from Bogota on a private plane and you're in in an actual conflict zone with actual guerrillas, with actual army operations. And that's how somebody like me ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. You guys remember BP? Of course, Jonathan, Jonathan would know a lot about BP because very active in Scotland and whatnot.

Antonio: BP sold their operations in Colombia to a company called Talisman Energy and another piece to the state oil company. I, I get into this. I get picked up in [00:12:00] a in a bulletproof Toyota and taken to to an airfield. Well, to the to the to the airfield in Bogota. So there's no doubt it has like a separate private aviation area and get put into a beach King Air 200 for like eight, 10 passengers. And I'm sitting there, we're heading towards the department. It's on the border with Venezuela. And literally, as far as we're landing, there's there's a an army colonel at the front of the plane. He's standing right next to the pilot, right behind the pilots. And he's asking the pilots, the captain, would you please fly over that way so he could show some some security people that come in? And I'm thinking, oh, my God, this colonel is the brother of a friend of mine. He's the son of a very famous general that was that was well known for for [00:13:00] for being out there in the field, going after the the guerrillas. And then I realized that I had been interpreting in a meeting that had been led by that same colonel about 30 days prior when twenty three contractors had been kidnaped in the area we were about to land in.

Alex G: Well, that's just fantastic.

Antonio: So they kidnaped twenty three people that they were doing seismic there, a couple of engineers, and they were they were let go or rescued or whatever, I don't remember what happened there. But imagine landing in this remote airfield. And realizing that this is the place where it happened and why the hell am I here and why didn't I realize that this is what I was getting myself into? So we had we get out of the plane and immediately you notice that something's amiss because there's a three meter berm around the whole landing strip and there's a machine gun turret [00:14:00] on every corner and there's soldiers all over the place. And we go into one of the Quonset huts for briefing and there's an army major with his long gun unit, whatever they are, 15, whatever the hell they use. And he's sitting in a little in a little bench and he's talking about subversive activities in the area. And there's a guerrilla operating in that area called at the time, Negril Cassio. And he, the major, helpfully informs us that the guy has four hundred men under under arms and in the vicinity. But they've chased they've managed to chase him south. And as he's doing the briefing, the shots start to ring and everybody hits the deck. It's not like in the movie where they say hit the ground, they're shooting. No, you hear shots, you go to the ground. And we were there on the ground for the longest time and and waiting for the all clear. And finally [00:15:00] we get a sort of all clear where we say, OK, we've chased them away, but you guys are going to have to leave. So that was our first experience. That was my first experience under under under gunfire. I'd had other experiences with oil companies.

Alex G: Wait, Tony, let me just let me just jump in here. I have so many questions. I have like

Antonio: Go

Alex G: A lot

Antonio: Go

Alex G: Of

Antonio: Ahead,

Alex G: Questions,

Antonio: Shoot away, no pun intended.

Alex G: Right. So at any point did James Bond show up? Because this sounds like straight out of a movie,

Antonio: No,

Alex G: So.

Antonio: James. No, I mean, yes, yes, yes, yes, and the Australian Special Forces, I ended up getting the Colombian colonel where all the all the James Bond people

Alex G: The

Antonio: You needed,

Alex G: Jesus.

Antonio: I mean, they sinewy arms, ripped short hair, muscular, totally unfazed by the thing that freaked me out is that I'm tall. And we were we [00:16:00] were in a small place, about 12 men, the the SAS guy and the Australian Special Forces guys were tall, but they managed to hit the deck faster than me. Of course I could. I couldn't I couldn't lower my right knee. And when we got up some some guy there that was with the oil company said, man, you're lucky. And I said, why? He says, because a guy as tall as you about three weeks ago was in the same position and a bullet came through and hit him in the knee. You gotta be kidding. I kid you not. I did manage to record something on my cell phone because I said this is literally a moment when I could I could die. So I'm going to record something on my cell phone, you know, just film something around here, take a couple of pictures and say we're under we're under fire and we're going to wait and see what happens.

Alex G: So before you went on this on this private plane, before any of that happened, how much [00:17:00] did you know what you were headed into like? Did they tell you, OK, today we're going to be talking about this sort of topic, like, did you know anything at all? Or was it just like, OK, meet us here, we'll put a bag over your head and off we go.

Antonio: Zero. If I had been if I had been more alert, I was I was lulled because I was working with a group of people that were super fun and we had a great day doing office interpretation, you know, talking to people and whatnot. We'd had a great lunch. Everybody was laughing. We were having a great time. At the end of the day, before the day of the flight, somebody came up to me and said, would you please sit at that desk and we want you to sign this? And it was. Yeah, there you go.

Jonathan: Be careful what you say when you go interrupting.

Antonio: Oh, yes, it was it was a waiver, if anything happens, we don't know you

Alex G: Life,

Antonio: At

Alex G: Liberty and limb.

Antonio: Life, liberty and Limb, you [00:18:00] are undertaking this at your own risk. But as as the story goes, I was young, but I wasn't young. I actually wasn't young at the time. I guess I was checking notes here to see when this place of that event was in twenty eight, which was an eventful year because of a lot of things that happened with with guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers. So I just signed this thing and I went and then I came back and I kept quiet about it. I went to have dinner with some friends and a friend of mine. We went out for a smoke and he says, You look kind of strange today. You're kind of quiet. And I said, this is what happened. And he said, Well, don't tell your wife. But but [00:19:00] there's there's

Alex G: Well,

Antonio: A

Alex G: You'll

Antonio: There's

Alex G: Find out

Antonio: A

Alex G: About it now, the cat's out of the bag.

Jonathan: It's.

Antonio: No no, she knows she knows there's there's you know, there's a coda to the story because I was asked to go with them on another trip to southern Colombia to do my own department the next day. And I said, guys, I can't I'm busy that day. And I.

Alex G: Nimdzi not dying,

Antonio: No, but

Alex G: But

Antonio: Listen, you know, what happened was

Alex G: Like.

Antonio: That they went they went to Putumayo and a guerrilla group, a little guerrilla unit kidnaped a couple of Chinese engineers and their interpreter. Yeah, yeah, you know, just because, you know, you're in a city, you go to the airport, you go out, there's the thing that's happened with Colombia's conflict is that it's not inside. The cities, for the most part, have been moments when they they'll set off a bomb somewhere. But it's not in the cities. Exactly. So people think that [00:20:00] they're not shooting in my direction. It's fine. But so I wanted to qualify what we mean by a conflict zone. This is a place that has been in conflict. It's a different conflict. But there's still shooting going on and there's still people getting hurt because of the conflict. And I think that what's happened to me is that I've tended to see the aftermath.

Alex G: Right, that sounds pretty conflict to the media. So so how do you prepare yourself like, well, I guess you don't really prepare yourself. What do you do after the fact with, you know, how do you, like, decompress? Because, I mean, you've done it again since then. So it seems that you've kind of processed through it. So how do you how do you go about that?

Antonio: I do it through music, I do it through cooking sometimes when it's really bad, I'll just I'll just keep quiet. My wife knows well enough. Just give me space. I just need to sit down and decompress. I think the difficult thing is if you [00:21:00] know from the get go that you're going into an actual shooting war. That's a different kind of preparation in my case, I would get like a call from the NDP that we're going to visit a certain part of Colombia from the coast, the Caribbean coast, into like a place called sincerely level. It's a city in a in a like a flat plain of the they do a lot of a lot of livestock cattle ranching, but it's been a very conflictive area. A friend of mine used to say that that was Colombia's Ho Chi Minh Trail. It's been a place that's been peopled by by smugglers, smugglers of all sorts of things, of things and people for the past 400 years. And it's also been an area that's been that's been riven by conflict, by by actual conflict between drug traffickers, [00:22:00] paramilitaries, guerrillas and so forth. In those cases, it's much more difficult because what will happen is that you'll come into a place like a town called Karmen, that whatever we drive in in a in a United Nations Land Rover, they taken the flags off because something had happened to up to a United Nations vehicle earlier sometime that month or something. And we go into Coromandel. You are calmer than what we had had had experienced a massive, horrible paramilitary attack. And as we go into the town, I see like the the chipped pieces of of a buildings.

Antonio: And I turn to to to the DP guy here in Bogota and he he nods. Yeah, those are bullet holes. And there were sandbags all around the oil all around the town city hall. And we were going to meet with with [00:23:00] a group of of civilians from the town that we're going to talk about their experience with the paramilitary attack. And that's what you're not prepared for. You're not prepared for the emotion of the stories. And these are people that have been silenced in many ways and silenced by bullets. They've been silenced by neglect, government neglect. And when somebody from the outside comes in, they want to talk. And the stuff they talk about is just absolutely horrifying. And it's very difficult to decompress from that. And when Sarah was when when I saw Sara's post and talking about vicarious trauma. That holy crap, that's exactly what I've been feeling when you hear these stories and you have to convey that it can be it can be extraordinarily difficult. On that particular trip, we ended up in a town that is on the far west of Bogota, far, far, far west corner of Bogota. [00:24:00] It's called Forgot that you are. And it was at the time a place that a lot of displaced people would come to. And we interviewed a girl, maybe about 13, who was too damn wise for her years. She'd been through too damn much. And we were in a school that she went to. And the there's a Dutch a Dutch expert from from you. MDT was asking the questions and she asked, well, what is your day like? As she described coming down from from from the house she lived in.

Antonio: And she she made up like a very pointed note that she had to watch out for the men. You know, this is this is a girl, only 13, but she already knew what the stakes were for a girl. So, you know, there's a there's a different point of view with regard to conflict when when you're getting it [00:25:00] in, and that in that way, you know, when the child is telling you without, she clearly was incredibly resilient. But I had a problem at some point with my interpretation because I was just I was just choking up. I was thinking, this is horrendous. She was proudly showing her school and it was just a really scrubby little school with a really limp little tree in the middle. And she's so proud of the garden and everything. And I was just ready to I was just ready to cry because it was like. Who knows what she's been through, that this place where I am, which is which is which is terrible, is is excellent for her. She's talking about how the older children being safe via the snack that they get from the government to give to the kids who don't have enough to eat at their and their homes. And these are all displaced people. They're they're [00:26:00] they're lost in their own country, you know, and that's that's what's really hard about that kind of conflict, because you're seeing the aftermath. You're seeing the results of a failed government policy of of violence. And and when you have to convey that it's it's very difficult. It really is.

Alex D: Now, Tony, one thing I've been wondering while I listen to you was do you sometimes find yourself having to, I don't know, change your interpreting technique or maybe do things a little bit differently than we are getting told at university or, you know, different from what the textbooks say on how to do interpreting in terms of, you know, neutrality and that kind of stuff. Do you find yourself

Antonio: Oh.

Alex D: Sometimes having to adapt in order to get through the situation?

Antonio: That's that's that's that's a very that's a very, very thoughtful question. I mean, thank you for a second. The [00:27:00] short answer is yes.

Alex D: Ok.

Antonio: The short answer is yes. And I think that the current the current problem, the the writer, Cory Doctorow, says we're not in an epistemological crisis. And I think that's true. I think that we're at a point where you have to wonder if neutrality is actually the way to go. I mean, if you if you're going to that kind of interpretation where you are, you're just droning. You're saying for reasons to do with the speed and intensity of armed conflict since the early 1990s, know somebody there a a a person from a small town is on the verge of tears. And you, I feel, do have to convey the level of of of hurt.

Alex D: Despair,

Antonio: As best

Alex D: Yeah.

Antonio: As best as curt and despair as best you can. You do have to find a way [00:28:00] to protect yourself, but I think at this point in time, you can't be neutral. And I remember describing a different kind of conflict, a different kind of problem, which was working with with mining companies. Mining companies are our experts at putting lipstick on pigs. You know, when you hear when you hear an extractive industry representative talking about sustainable practices about it, I have been to these mines. I have seen these huge holes. I have seen the slag heaps. Give me a break. The environment is going to be destroyed, and I and I had to stop myself once with and I don't care about saying their name was with with BHP Billiton, we're going to they were going to change the course of the [00:29:00] Rancheria River. In the mine where they wear the mine, a really high quality coal, it's an open pit mine, and in that case, I was not an interpreter. I was actually going to do a voiceover for a corporate video that was explaining why there was no environmental issue. River and Hita, the Waheeda Peninsula, is a desert, and it's a place I really love in Colombia that I've I've been to many times, and I said, hell no, I'm not going to do this. I just stood up and I said, I'm not going to do this. I will not condone this kind of this kind of thing that's B.S. You're going to hurt the indigenous people there. You're going to ruin who knows what in the environment because you're going to move the river so you can get to the coal underneath it. Forget it. So to your question, Alexander. No, I think I think the time [00:30:00] is long past being neutral. We are where we are because of a false sense of of of a need to be neutral. I remember one of your shows. I don't know which one was talking about performative or interpretive or whatever. I don't know if you had some sort of technical term for it. I forget when

Alex G: That

Antonio: You're

Alex G: Was the InterpretBank

Antonio: When you're

Alex G: And.

Antonio: Interpreting me. Yes, exactly. When I'm with with a multilevel marketing company and and there I am doing consecutive. But they they play Opas. I have a dream. And there I am with a candle. I have a dream.

Jonathan: You're going to lose all of your money and give it

Antonio: That's

Jonathan: To me.

Antonio: That's their job. Exactly. That's the job, so, yeah, no, I think I think you you that's why I always go back to my favorite word. No, you do have to stop and say, OK, I have to stop and listen and ask [00:31:00] a lot of questions. What is this? Where is it? What is it for who does it and if it does? Because as I as I told Sarah the first time we talked, I think what's what concerned me the most about all these things relating to conflict and to the aftermath of conflict is that you can find yourself as an interpreter very easily. In a position of being the facilitator, the enabler for things that will haunt you.

Sarah: I remember that from when we talked, I thought there was an excellent point because, yeah, of course, we're always told, you know, that neutrality is important and technically we're just the ones relaying what other people are doing. But of course, there comes a point in extreme situations like the ones you were in, you know, where it goes beyond that. And the interpreter is no longer just neutral, like by you [00:32:00] know, like you said, you become a facilitator and then you have to make a personal choice. So.

Antonio: Oh, sure, sure, sure.

Jonathan: I mean, there was a couple of things going on in my head. One, I've written quite a lot on utilities. I'm going to park that because I could do a long run

Antonio: We're going

Jonathan: On

Antonio: To.

Jonathan: An online utility. Sucks. But the question I was going to ask today is, you know, it's almost certain that you're not the only interpreter in Colombia going into these environments. Do you ever talk to either don't care if those with similar experiences is that any sort of association or grouping or training that you do together to help each other? Because no one else can quite understand what it's like to interpret their.

Antonio: Ok, two stories to answer your question, and it's a great question, story number one, there was a United Nations cities event in Bogota and we set up a little group and I was talking with a group of friends and there were a couple of friends, French interpreters. [00:33:00] And we were talking about some of the stuff that we just heard some of these politicians say. And we were all in very, very vehement disagreement, and my colleagues and a friend for many years said, you know what, I was in the booth about three months ago, and there was I can't remember what Colombian politician was was talking. And he started saying something and she said from the booth, he's lying. He's saying is not true. Yes, you can you can spread those yeah, just open those eyes wide and I'm going to put eyedrops in there.

Alex D: I mean, we've

Antonio: That

Alex D: All

Antonio: Exactly

Alex D: We've all said that maybe it's just not our mike.

Antonio: Right. No, but I mean, no, but but but it's a serious question. I mean, you do have to ask yourself if if you come to a point where something breaks, where where you where you can. Not [00:34:00] really. I mean, what are you if you're just taking money and you're and you're. Yes, it's your job. Yes. You were trained to do it this way. Yes. You were trained to be neutral. But certainly I'm trying to remember the name of the interpreter who was interpreting for Trump in Finland and all the brouhaha about about that particular moment with Putin and at about somebody saying, I'm going to subpoena her, her notes. And I laughed. Yeah, go ahead. Subpoena, subpoena a consecutive interpreters. No luck with that.

Alex D: Yeah, we did a special episode on that. Mm

Antonio: I

Alex D: Hmm.

Jonathan: The.

Antonio: Know. I know. That's why I mention it. But I was thinking I was thinking I was I felt so much for her because I was thinking, what are you doing sitting behind this idiot at having to interpret that? And I know I know State Department interpreters. I know these people hyper professional, hyper [00:35:00] competent, hyper well-trained linguists having to sit behind somebody and listen to these things. It's a it's a tough call. I think that's something that Dr. Downie will have to write about.

Sarah: Yet.

Alex D: Get to work, Jonathan.

Antonio: Go for it, Jonathan.

Jonathan: I I'm just

Antonio: It's

Jonathan: Letting you take this

Antonio: Tough,

Jonathan: One. But

Antonio: I'll take one.

Jonathan: I think

Antonio: I'll take one for the team. But go ahead.

Jonathan: But

Antonio: Go ahead.

Jonathan: But I think one of the things that really jumped out at me is when I was doing my Ph.D., I had a supervisor by the name of Graham Turner, and he's a sign language specialist. And he says that we have to move away from thinking terms of just relaying meaning and realizing that most of the time when we interpret that we're not really meaning, we're help people. We're helping people create meaning, you know, negotiating what this means and negotiating. And can your stories about, you know, when you know, the mining companies coming in and you know what they're going to do, there is an ethical responsibility that arises. If you're going to decide [00:36:00] or, you know, I don't care, I'm just going to take my money and go. It's I mean, some of it, I guess, beforehand. How much of an option do you get? How much briefing do you get when you go? Is this BHP Billiton doing HRR or do you know? All right, this is the time to read. They're trying to move there forever. Did you always know exactly what's going to happen or is it just BHP Billiton on the phone? Can you come and interpret for us?

Antonio: Well, Jonathan, I think I think that the honest answer to that question is I'm 60 years old and I'm in a different position in my life. I mean, this is this is something, you know. If I could just remember the Shakespeare quote, any life or something like that, I was a different man when I was 30, I was a different man was 40. I had different needs. I had different I had different stresses. At age 60, I can look back and say, yeah, I know [00:37:00] when I was when I was 40, BHP Billiton called in. I just jump out a plane and go. But it's after the fact when you start thinking about things that that this comes into play. So I think that one of the big problems it is, is making it too academic in the sense what you're conveying, what is meaning and all that. I think we have to become a little bit more tribal in the good sense. And you do have a right to demand more information. And I think we do have to take personal responsibility for for working for certain types of clients. So the bottom line is I no longer work for those types of companies.

Antonio: Because because, you know, I've come to a point where I say, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're going to if you're going to wreck some some some part of the country that I absolutely love and you're telling people that according to your metrics, it's going to be fine. It's not. Because I don't know if you guys will agree with me that [00:38:00] I think something that has never been, to my knowledge, spoken of academically is the fact that we're not in some high minded sort of way conveying meaning to helping to reconstruct, yadda, yadda, yadda. We are flies on the wall and like flies, we have compound eyes and we have like this enormous apparatus, antennae that are listening. We're catching all sorts of meaning from from physical expression, from body language, from tone of voice, the good old register and whatnot. We're kept. But as flies on the wall, we're capturing other deeper things, like when somebody comes in and talks about faith in extractive industries. I went to an event that was all about faith in the extractive [00:39:00] industries and my head exploded.

Alex D: That's what they called it.

Antonio: Yes, these were actual priests talking about community outreach and whatnot, and I was thinking, you know, I try not to become cynical, but these companies will go in and negotiate with any any government in the world. If things were not that way, nobody would have drill for oil in Libya under Gadhafi. So you can paint it any way you want, but we're at a point in the history of the world where, where, where positions have to be taken because the consequences of not doing it are are massive.

Sarah: Yeah, I like the point you're making there, but, you know, sometimes we often find in the InterpretBank community we talk about interpreting too much of an academic sense, you know, the way it's supposed to be, the way it's intended to be, you know, but often, like in a situation like like yours or other people I spoke to [00:40:00] as well, it's not that perfect. It's not laid out like in university. The situations are extreme or like your situation or I interviewed someone who works in pediatric care clinic, but lots of kids that are about to die and things like that. And it's just not the same. Right. How can you just talk about the level of neutrality that's needed? And and it sounds like, you know, the human side of the interpreter is often forgotten. And it's sure partially we're supposed to be the middleman, the fly on the wall. But we we can we are humans. We cannot fully take that human element away. Right.

Antonio: Right, right,

Sarah: And that's

Antonio: Right.

Sarah: What we talked about. But with the effect on the interpreters or and the lack of care, I remember I think in some missions you were saying as well, everyone on the mission or sometimes everyone in the hospital as well. The other person interviewed, they all get this aftercare, you know, to deal with trauma, except for the interpreter who was maybe even more involved because they process [00:41:00] the emotions as well, you know, through them.

Antonio: Let me ask you guys a question, you're in Europe and you would think that Europe has much more sense of those types of things. A lot of times I find that here in Columbia, the interpreter, we're just the help just brought in and there's your booth and just do your thing. I don't know if it's the same way in Europe. And that would explain why nobody.