The Drawbacks of Being Favorite

This Spring semester, I took a Spanish translation course and kind of expected the worst. But after the first class, I realized that I actually enjoyed the challenge of finding textual equivalence between English and Spanish.

As the semester wore on, my teacher caught on to my proficiency of the Spanish language and came to like me more and more. She would always ask me things about my major and whether or not I would take translation 2, at which point I let on to the fact that I'm actually still a high schooler. (I usually don't give up this information unless absolutely necessary, as I've found that it generally instills a sense of superiority in everyone else, which seriously bothers me. I could tell them that I'm 18 and thus college-age anyway and at least of collegiate maturity [interpret that as you wish], but I think that trying to justify my maturity by my age would make me look all the more defensive and high schooler-ish, and I feel a whole lot better just leaving them to their false presuppositions. Anyway, back to the story at hand...) I think that made her like me even more. At one point, she even told me in her heavy Spanish accent that I'm "basically a native speaker."

There were other favored ones, of course. Brent, for example, had learned Spanish by working at a Mexican restaurant and was pretty conversational. He was also the one and only male in our class of roughly 20 students, poor guy.

Finally, the last class came. Brent was absent; in fact, a lot of people were absent, now that I think about it...

Profesora Campoy decided to do an interpretation activity. Interpretation differs from translation in that translation happens on paper and over a period of time; interpretation happens orally and on the spot.

We were given a sheet of paper and told to work in groups of three. The paper was essentially a script depicting a conversation between prosecutor and an eyewitness in a courtroom setting. The prosecutor spoke English; the witness, Spanish. We had to fill in the interpretations, then read them aloud in front of the class. Rather sixth grade-esque, right? Fortunately, only two groups were selected for humiliation.

Unfortunately, my group was one of them.

I had finished up kind of early and passed on my translations to my groupmates so they could copy them. While I sat around being finished, Prof. Campoy came up and made pleasant conversation with me. It included the usual "You should really pursue translation..." and ended with, "Do you want to be a volunteer? Of course you do. Wait for me to call on you."

My poor groupmates...they must hate me for being "basically a native speaker." I did too, at that moment.

The other group that went up had the luxury of reading their answers straight off the paper--each of the 3 members acting as either prosecutor, witness, or interpreter.

Our turn came.

"Michelle, I don't think you need your paper." (She doesn't know my REAL name. Another thing, along with my age, that I don't have the energy to bother people about.)

That's right. I interpreted a court hearing without even looking at my paper. Thank whatever special measures my parents took to grow my brain right that I have a pretty admirable short-term memory, so I still almost quoted my script word-for-word. Huzzah. Then I felt all stuck-up and superior n stuff in front of the whole class cause the prof kept commending me for my superb translations. Rather sixth grade-esque, right?