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Italian culture

In the Company of Lawyers

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I’ve spent the last two weeks interpreting (English to Italian and back again) for depositions in an arbitration between a Venezuelan and an Italian company – work that I was offered via a colleague on the board of Democrats Abroad-Milan. It was arranged at the last minute, so the hirers didn’t insist on any special qualifications beyond fluency in both languages, and an American accent (for the benefit of the court reporters coming from Miami to transcribe). The money was very, very good (and very handy right now), so I made time for the job.

It was an interesting, though exhausting, experience. It wasn’t quite simultaneous translation, but near enough, especially when the lawyer started machine-gunning questions. And I had to think hard about precise shades of meaning. In a legal situation, it’s more important to get the exact meaning of both questions and answers than to translate elegantly – which frustrated me at first, since I’m a writer, and style is important to me.

The English language skills of the witnesses varied, improving steadily as we moved up the ranks of the company (cause or effect?). Everyone we interviewed was an engineer in some sense or other, and therefore understood and used many English terms in his everyday work. (“His” is the correct pronoun – they were all men.) And there are many English words in common use in business Italian where there is no efficient equivalent in Italian, e.g. “training.”

Most of the witnesses understood English well enough to follow most of the questions, although, when a single question ran on for a hundred words, I often lost track of it myself. With some witnesses, I was a mere convenience – they spoke and understood English well enough to do it all in English, so their lawyers’ insistence that I translate both questions and answers was simply a play for time, a way of forcing the witnesses to slow down and think before they spoke. One man kept answering the questions before I had a chance to translate. His lawyers frowned at me every time this happened but, hey, he’s your witness – you tell him how to behave. He was senior enough that I wasn’t going to interrupt his train of thought to translate a question that he had clearly understood perfectly. I also didn’t want to insult anyone’s English abilities.

The last witness, a senior VP, conducted his deposition entirely in very good English, and was in no danger of shooting off his mouth.

There were two tracks of depositions going on at the same time, and in the second week professional interpreters were brought in for the other track. I learned from them that I was being a masochist – the pros work half-day shifts, and were astonished that I was doing full days, especially with no prior experience. They agreed with my finding that about 40 minutes at a time is the most one can expect to be effective – around the 45-minute mark I would begin to feel my synapses smoking. Thankfully, there were breaks every hour, to change the videotape and allow the teams of lawyers to confer among themselves.

I came away with a few observations which had nothing to do with translation. One was a reinforced belief that I would never be able to work for a typical Italian company of this type. There were six or seven levels of hierarchy among the various men we interviewed, with the guys at the top living on Mount Olympus as far as their juniors were concerned. In turn, the top guy had about 1300 people working for him, most of whose names he barely knew. <shudder> I couldn’t bear to be in an organization like that. Even at Roxio, I had direct access to the CEO (and a cubicle conveniently located outside his office). Not that that access did me much good…

I also admired the skills of the lawyers. In addition to the law (of at least three countries), they had to know the reams of documentation that had already been presented in the case, as well as the reams being generated in the current testimony, and make use of it to try to trap the witnesses into admissions which the witnesses’ lawyers were equally cleverly helping their clients to sidestep. They all brought an oratorical and actorly flair to the process, one side building up the emotional pressure and trying to cause a slip, while the other side made convenient objections and used the hourly breaks to instruct the witnesses (I presume – I was never privy to what went on between the witnesses and their counsel).

I developed techno-lust for the Blackberries that all the lawyers were so attached to. I had vaguely heard about these and knew them to be particularly popular in Washington, and had just noticed them advertised by Italian mobile phone providers. One of the lawyers told me they’re cheap in the US – as low as $120 for the device, plus $25 a month or so for the service. Not cheap in Italy, as I shortly discovered. One of the companies is charging 576 euros for the device, and after that I didn’t bother to ask how much they were charging for the service. I’ll either have to wait, or figure out whether it’s possible to use a US-purchased Blackberry with an Italian SIM card.

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Italian language

Being Bilingual is Good for Your Brain

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There is a deep-rooted superstition among some Italian doctors and teachers that raising a child bilingual causes the child problems, such as slower overall language development, and academic problems later in school. Fortunately, I never fell for that line, as I had done my homework about bilingualism while still pregnant (above). And it doesn’t stand up to common sense and experience – in many parts of the world, including many parts of Italy, it is very common for children to grow up speaking a local dialect or language in addition to their country’s official tongue(s). Swiss children, depending what part of Switzerland they live in, routinely speak at least two major languages – sometimes languages as unrelated to each other as French and German – and learn another one or two at school.

But I know of some multi-national families in Italy who were browbeaten into raising their children to speak only Italian at least until school age, missing the perfect opportunity for the kids to become bilingual easily and naturally. These kids as a result could not communicate with half of their blood relations, and had one parent who could not speak to them in his/her own language. How terribly sad.

Fortunately, a new study shows that being bilingual, far from being a disadvantage, is good for your brain. Now we have ammunition against stupid interference from “authorities”:

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School “Mortality” in Italy

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Today is the last day of school (in Lombardia). Making the local headlines yesterday was a 14-year-old girl who threw herself off a bridge, because she knew she would fail her first year of high school. Her reaction is both extreme and unusual, because failing one or more years of high school – any high school – is common in Italy, and doesn’t carry much stigma. Ross estimates that 8 or 9 of her class of 28 (including herself) are likely to flunk.

Some likely reasons for this high failure rate (or mortalita’ scolastica – “school mortality,” as it’s called) include:

Between a heavy curriculum and often-incompetent teachers, students are left to make their own way through reams of material covered badly, if at all, in class. Sometimes they are even expected to study and understand a new topic on their own, before any mention is made of it in class. The lucky ones have parents who can help them, and/or can afford to pay outside tutors for help in one or more subjects. These tutors are usually teachers themselves, either just starting out (and lacking, as yet, a permanent position), or retired, or teaching at other schools. I am tempted to wonder whether the problems outlined above are wilfully ignored because they provide extra income (tax-free, under the table) for otherwise underemployed and underpaid teachers.

Even for the kids bright enough to get through it all on their own, 34 hours a week in the classroom, plus homework, is a lot of studying. And it’s exhausting for parents to come home from their own jobs and then have to spend an hour or two getting their heads around academic subjects they haven’t touched in years, in order to help their children with homework.

No wonder we’re all completely burned out. Today’s the last day of school. All the kids will be doing something to celebrate the end of a gruelling year, whether they passed or not. We parents deserve a pat on the back as well, for all OUR hard work. In fact, we deserve a party. But I’m too tired to organize one right now.

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Jul 5, 2004

Ross did manage to pass her first year of high school, with three “academic debits.” This means that she has lots of homework to do over the summer, and by early September must be ready to prove to her teachers that she has done it. She’s very busy at theatre camp in the US for six weeks now, so August is going to be a hell of homework and nagging for all of us…

next: private school

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The Family That Eats Together

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The other night I attended a party of Americans, with their Italian significant others and families. One American remarked that the kids present were amazingly polite, well-spoken, and self-possessed, compared with American kids of the same ages. He was right, but I hadn’t particularly noticed, because it’s what I’ve grown to expect.

I have written before about the brattiness of many young Italian kids, but I have also long observed that, by the time they reach puberty, most Italian kids are very civilized in adult company and can hold their own in adult conversations. This seems to be achieved without much discipline when the kids are younger, a noticeable difference from the US, where I have seen parents literally beating young kids into submission, and yet those same kids are not much fun to have dinner with when they’re teenagers.

It seems that Italian families work more by example than overt discipline. Most families have at least one meal together a day, usually a leisurely one. With so much exposure to adult company, the kids naturally absorb good table manners, conversation skills, and healthy eating habits (assuming that those things are present in the family, as they usually are).

Kids also learn at home to drink like responsible adults. It’s very normal to begin sampling wine with meals from an early age, and even to be offered it in restaurants (if the parents are drinking any) from age 13 or so. By law, kids can drink in bars or buy alcohol from age 16; it’s not unusual for high school kids to spend a Saturday evening hanging out in a bar drinking beer, just like college kids do in the States.

In spite of the easy availability, most Italian young people don’t binge drink the way Americans do – partly, I suspect, because it doesn’t carry the thrill of illicit behavior. So you rarely see anyone, young or old, drunk in public – that’s not considered cool in Italy, even among teenagers.

related article: The Family That Eats (and Drinks, and Talks) Together

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Italian culture

Macho Animals …with Artificial Testicles

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My friend Sara runs the Prevent a Litter Coalition, an American charity promoting spaying and neutering of pets, to prevent unwanted litters of puppies and kittens being born and (often) abandoned, abused, or euthanized because shelters cannot find good homes for them.

From Sara I learned about Neuticles, fake testicles for neutered pets – so that your gelded male pet can look as macho as ever, even if he acts like a pussy(cat). I find the whole idea ludicrous, but apparently the prospect of a ball-less pet is a psychological barrier to neutering for many pet owners, especially men.

This is probably a factor in the low incidence of neutering of Italian pets. Some parts of Italy, especially Rome, have famously large populations of feral cats. These are fed by “cat ladies,” some of whom are reputed to lure cats with food, capture them, and whisk them off to be neutered (though I doubt that many of these retired ladies could actually afford the cost). This supposed practice is viewed with horror by Italian men, who feel an all-too-keen vicarious sympathy with the ex-tom cats. (These are the same men who superstitiously touch their own testicles when they see a nun, to ward off bad luck; I suppose a woman who can do without men is a symbolic threat to all manhood.)

A few years ago, one of the biggest celebrities in Italy was Varenne, a champion trotting horse. His exploits on the track endeared him to many Italians who knew little about horses or racing. They were sorry to see him retire to the stud farm at age seven, but contented themselves with imagining their idol happily ensconced in a harem of mares.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works for champion studs. The fans were dismayed to learn that Varenne would not have any actual contact with mares; like many stud stallions, he mounts a dummy, from which his sperm is collected and divided up, each dose thus being stretched to inseminate up to ten mares (if I remember correctly), at a cost of 60,000 euros each.

There was a popular uproar about Varenne’s dismal fate. After all those years of thrilling the public, surely he deserved a few real thrills himself? Varenne’s owner conceded that the stallion could have a companion mare, with whom he would actually be allowed to have sex from time to time. But the owner soon backpedaled, claiming that it would be dangerous for a stallion accustomed to the dummy to mate with a real mare: either or both of the parties might get hurt. The more likely pain would have been to the owner’s bankroll: each of Varenne’s authentic sexual experiences would have cost 600,000 euros – no horse’s sex life is worth that much, even in Italy.

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