From the author’s long experience both as a business interpreter, as well as a teacher of dialogue interpreting, there seems to be considerable discrepancy between the needs and best practices of the business profession and those of the interpreter, at least those taught in the classroom or laid down in the literature (A. Gentile 1996; et al.) as the professional tenets and ethics of the bilingual mediator. Indeed, the interpreter’s best practices - from debriefing through turn-taking to the rendering of all the ideas expressed by the speaker – is not only utopian, it is frequently anathema to the clients whose cultural mindset is determined by speed, concision and efficiency.
Without doubt, the interpreting profession has been instrumental in taking translation away from the need to translate every word, but at the same time, having replaced the word with ideas or sense, it seems reticent to admit that ideas too burden communication. More and more, Anglo-Saxon business-speak is being measured in sound-bites, what Mark Twain defined long before the term was coined as “the minimum sound for the maximum sense”. Anglo-Saxon society is fast becoming a “tweet” society – the only thing worth listening to can be said in 140 characters or less. And other languages, like Italian for example, tend for cultural reasons to range from eloquence to the verbose and grandiloquent.
