Sunday, December 25, 2016

My Greek Interpreter



For light reading during the holidays, I've put a short article on my Academia.edu page. It relates an incident from my 20-year career (1970-1990) as a freelance conference interpreter in Canada, and incidentally it quotes a story that throws some light from an unexpected source on professional interpreters in Victorian England. To read it, click [here] or go to https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS. The title is My Greek Interpreter.

The reason I think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a real-life model for the character of Mr Melas in the quoted story is the verisimilitude of the latter's description of his work. He says that he knows "all languages – or nearly all," (Conan Doyle obviously describes him with tongue in cheek) and this reminds me of an interpreter who used to work in the Toronto courts. His first language was Russian, but he claimed that he could interpret all the Slavic languages. Eventually he was found out by a lawyer of Polish extraction who then had to do the interpreting himself for one of his Polish clients. (It was admissible in those days.) It was the lawyer who told me about him.

Image
Illustration by Sidney Paget for the first publication of The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter in The Strand Magazine, 1893. Mr Melas is on the right.

Merry Christmas!

3 comments:

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