Déjà vu

A couple of weeks ago, two things happened at work that I thought about a lot, but didn't get a chance to talk over with anyone else to see if they found a similar significance in the events or if I was just blowing them out of proportion. Tonight, however, while reading fned's blog, I felt a definite sense of déjà vu and simply had to blog about the parallels in her experiences and my own.

Fned states:
"I recall a few months ago reading a monthly report sent by a British manager to his French boss. The mail was detailed but not overwhelming in description, contained praise and recrimination where called for; mentioned areas for improvement and pinpointed subjects that needed to be addressed before they became problems. I remember thinking « Wow! What a great report! It provides all the necessary information and yet remains simple and clear for someone who’s not on hand locally ».

In my case, it happened like this:
One of my students needed to write up a presentation his boss would make at an international board of directors in English. So we used the class to do it and we came up with what I thought were three very powerful slides. They were "detailed but not overwhelming in description, mentioned areas for improvement and pinpointed subjects that needed to be addressed before they became problems."
That was on a Friday.

Fned continues:
The French boss later forwarded that same report to his own Boss after having deleted 75% of the text, keeping only the strictly essential of the message (past events, new developments, next steps) all in a series of concise and brief bullet points.

In my case:
The next Monday, my student greeted me by showing me the final version of his presentation, which his boss had gone over and "forwarded to his own Boss after having deleted 75% of the text, keeping only the strictly essential of the message (past events, new developments, next steps) all in a series of concise and brief bullet points" in a single slide.

PRETTY CLOSE!

Fned contends that she can't help "feeling that somewhere in that example was a very subtle indication of the differences in how corporate information is conveyed from one country to the other."

In my case (a situation of Americans, Mexicans and Germans working together), I thought, hmmm, it must be an international phenomenon... the higher up you go, the more concise the information must be...

But no matter how you see it, it does seem that the highest level of an international corporation will never really be abreast of the realities they are facing. By the time they get the information, it is so edited that they never really see what the people who are actually working on those projects are facing. Makes me wonder!

The other event was what fned described as "how the first person is used (or not used) in communicating." She gives the example of English speakers using the first person "I" or "we", thus implicating the person in the message. She says that the French use "on" which could be interpreted as "we" but not necessarily including the person actually communicating the message!

I would like to add that Spanish speakers have an even more ambiguous way of getting around pointing the finger. In Spanish you can use "se" to say that something "was done", without shedding light on who actually did it. This of course is the passive voice and is used in English too, but sparingly! Key information needs to be more precise. You might say: IT WAS DECIDED that... but only if you begin with something like: WE had a meeting, during the course of which it was decided that...

In Spanish you can start by saying: A meeting was had, and it was decided that... and we are left with a question in our minds as to WHO HAD THE MEETING????

As a translator, I have battled with this issue time and again. Sometimes I have to call a client to ask for clarification on the who, what and where of things because of what I perceive as rampant (ab)use of "se".

In conclusion, I have to agree with fned that it gets really tricky when you want to translate meaning from one language to another!