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anywhere, anytime which makes me lose entire chunks of my life in Washington; I can’t tell you how many theater and symphony ticets I have forfeited, how many social events I have missed. The mode of transportation in this travel is sometimes rather scary — rickety Soviet era helicopters, military cargo planes, nuclear subma rines, aircraft carriers. The frequent overseas travel leads to almost con stant jet lag, although that has come in handy when treaty negotiating sessions with the Ukrainians in Kyiv have stretched into the early dawn hours, say 4 or 5 a.m. By midnight, when most of our Ukrainain interlocutors are getting drowsy, I am just perking up and eager to continue working for as long as necessary. During long meetings or negotiating sessions I am under incredible mental pressure to perform the best, to be right on target in my choice of words. I can’t let my mind wander for a second because a second is all it takes to miss that one key word which ties everything together. The limits of my mental and physical capabilities are tested on a regular ba^is when traveling with official US delegations overseas or hosting Ukrainian visitors in the United States. We interpreters jokingly refer to these trips as “exercises in sleep deprivation”. The perks to being an interpreter, however, far out weigh any possible negative aspects. In the regular course of performing my job I get to mix with interna tional leaders, with those that shape the history of the world; I get to see them on the job as well as during “down time”, when they are just people as opposed to prime ministers and presidents. As interpreter I get to attend the most lavish recep tions in awe-inspiring palaces and the most elegant state dinners at the White House, but of course I rarely get to sample any of the wonderful food and certainly none of the fine wines served there because — you guessed it, I’m always interpreting. Waving away waiters with magical dessert creations of the White House pas try chelj is very difficult but needs to be done. Just because the setting is informal does not mean that important issues are not being discussed. We call this the interpreter’s diet. Although I did get to sample some of those fabulous desserts in 1993. Les Aspin was Secretary of Defense and our ties with Ukraine centered on nuclear disarmament issues. This led to many meet ings in a variety of settings, including working dinners and lunches. Secretary Aspin’s doctors had forbidden him to eat sweets due to his heart condition. So he would always take his dessert, slide it over to me and insist that I sample it so “it didn’t go to waste". Bless his heart. And anyone who is even vaguely familiar with big city traffic will appreciate the following. My ultimate thrill is riding in the limo with the President of Ukraine when he comes to Washington and having noontime dowtown traffic stop for us as we go whizzing by with little Ukrainian flags on the hood of the long black car. I just live for those rare moments. Although I do remember the exact moment when my job as interpreter reached a new level. It was prior to my third White House teleconference, in which the Pres ident or Vice President places a call to the President or Prime minister of Ukraine. The first two times that I was alerted to come to the White House I didn’t sleep for two nights prior in nervous anticipation of the assignment. By the time the third request was made,)I laughed out loud when I caught myself actually writing in my appointment book "Go to White House” just in case I would forget. But even though this job has become routine it has not become less exciting. After all, I consider myself very lucky to have a job which takes me to a luau in Hawaii complete with Polynesian dancing girls one month and the next month to literally “the middle of nowhere”, to Pervomaysk, south of Kyiv to witness the destruction of a Soviet era nuclear missile silo. But all this can be considered secondary to the essence of being an interpreter — which is using lan guage to facilitate communication between two parties. This type of work involves much more than simply being proficient in two languages. I once read that in the course of performing his or her job, an interpreter has to listen, remember, edit, write, summarize, pick and choose appropriate words, in short: be a walking the saurus/encyclopedia. However, for Ukrainian interpre ters this job entails a number of other unique dimen sions, with which for example French or Spanish interpreters are not burdened. For the first few years after Ukrainian independence and to an even greater extent today, I am forced to deal with a language that is a living, evolving organism. All languages are to a certain extent, but Ukrainian is uni que in this respect. It is a language that has been out lawed, humiliated, censored, polonized, russified and generally undergone enough ordeals to dampen the spirits of even the most optimistic among us. And yet, it has survived and is in the very real process of being reborn. I celebrate that rebirth and yet it is that rebith which makes my job all the more difficult. Take, for example, the following sentence which I had to interpret during a recent visit of representatives from the Ukrain ian equivalent of the Coast Guard. I quote “The 24 week FT course includes instruction on DC/Ac analysis, analog and digital circuits, microprocessing, radar basic, syn- chro/servotheory,... ordnance administration, fire con trol ballistics and basic math through advanced trigo nometry functions.” Once I figured out what this sentence means in real English as opposed to military English, where was I supposed to seek help in interpret ing it into Ukrainian when there are no easily accessible English Ukrainian military dictionaries, no polytechnical dictionaries, no medical, agricultural, scientific diction "HALUE Ж ИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 1996 19
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