By Enti Bracamonte
Posted: March 6, 2022

Lecture in Lima, Peru.

The César Vallejo University held a seminar on translation and interpretation. I was asked to talk about problems often encountered in simultaneous interpretation work and Marisú, my wife, was asked to talk about business strategies for beginners.

Our presentations consisted of only a few slides, but, believe me, there was a lot to unpack in them; so much, in fact, that a couple of the other presenters kindly gave a few minutes of their time allotment to both Marisú and I. We got great feedback from the audience.

 A demo or a practical? It’s all semantics, really.

So that’s me holding the microphone in the picture above. The caption says I aced a practical exercise. Apparently, it was an interpretation contest and I won. I was given a dictionary as a prize.

Right about now, you must be thinking it was a very unfair contest—with me being a seasoned interpreter and all…

But what really happened was that the presenter of that particular segment, a very clever Chilean who actually had his very own dictionary published, wanted a volunteer to give a demonstration. He asked several times, but no one was taking the challenge.

Perhaps the topic of the interpretation segment was a bit intimidating for the crowd: It was a video on the mining industry and the use of explosives. “Ha! No pressure there,” I thought, “I’ll just stay put in my cozy chair and see who takes the bait,” I thought.

But never one to be easily deterred, my lovely wife, seen in the photo above, sitting right next to me, mustered all her courage, waved at the presenter, and volunteered me. She was convinced, beyond any doubt, that I could do a fine job. I wish I were as confident as she is of my own skills.

Once duly on the spot, I politely accepted the microphone and a pair of hard-plastic earbuds and thought to myself, “The university students, in the audience, could use a good demo,” and went to work…

The result of that was a standing ovation. My wife and I knew the audience had loved our presentations because the organizers had been gauging their social networks all throughout, but that demo really seemed to have made everyone’s day. We were asked by the organizers to do the closing of the seminar—which we did, with the help of our gracious co-presenters, the finest people we have ever met.