Here’s another pickle in the booth I heard from my dear friend and colleague Christiana. She specialises in medical interpreting and has years of experience. This is what she told us one day over lunch, which made us nearly choke splitting our sides.
“We were at this medical conference. Early in the morning, the keynote speaker, a Japanese expert, walked onto the stage and greeted the audience: ‘Good morning radies and gentremen, we’re going to talk about a very important concept in raryngorogy (laryngology): the musorayer.’ I froze. Despite all my years in the booth of medical conferences of all sorts, I had never heard anything that resembled musorayer. I turned to my colleague for support but found none. She signalled to me that she too was at a loss. Never heard that. Nobody knew what he meant. Without losing my cool, I went on and on, going around the unknown term every time the speaker mentioned it. Slide after slide, only pictures, no words, to my utter despair. And musorayer this, musorayer that. And the doctor went on and on about the musorayer. At my wit’s end, I followed his speech trying as best I could to be accurate, though always avoiding the mysterious word.
As his time ran out, the Japanese doctor showed his last, revealing slide: against a black backgroud, huge white block letters read THE MUSCLE LAYER. To which I, in a very natural tone of voice, said: “of course by now all of you must have figured out that all along we were talking about the MUSCLE LAYER”.
