Abroad is bloody...

When I was a teacher - a long time ago - I was often asked to do things that were not part of my job. If help was needed, I never refused. That was the case for many foreign languages teachers although I would have to say that not many employers valued what their translators did.

So I translated the words of 'Taps' for a girl guide into French, with not the faintest idea what it was about (because I'd never been a guide) and didn't complain when the child who asked me to do it said this wasn't what her guide leader (if that's what they're called) wanted. She wanted a professional translation with rhymes and so on, and that wasn't what I could offer.

I phoned a hospital in Marseille where a friend's daughter was laid up, having fallen down a hole in the road coming out of a nightclub (no comment from me on her sobriety) and was able to talk to the duty staff nurse about her broken pelvis (she was a lot more willing to comment on the patient's state of sobriety) and was able to arrange for her to be brought home.

More terribly, I translated documents and newspaper articles from France, Germany and Spain relating to the deaths of young people I had taught. On one occasion, the parents of the dead boy sat in my livingroom while upstairs I typed a translation of his death certificate and details of the arrangements for his body to be brought home to Scotland. I doubt if I've ever experienced anything more harrowing. Because there is nothing more harrowing than parents burying a child.

I don't take it well when people devalue the work of the translator. I'm shocked to read that only a third of the MSPs in the Scottish Parliament speak a foreign language. Does that mean when MSPs meet Chinese delegates who want to set up links with Scotland, they have to employ translators? Have they any idea how much will be missed if they have to rely on translators? Or the Scotch whisky lobby can't talk to their biggest market: the EU? Except, of course, I know they can, if only because the lead in that market is Donald MacKenzie (ex-Islay High School and now resident in France as our Whisky Ambassador).

Whatever the outcome of this fiasco called the EU referendum, Scotland needs to take a look at what we consider important in trade terms. I once spent a long couple of days with a high heid yin from Ciby-Geigy who told me he never bothered trying to recruit Scottish people who spoke the European languages he needed. He just brought in native speakers of French, German and Spanish. I asked how he knew these people were providing him with correct translations. He didn't.

O, how easy it is to fool people.