SOMETHING IN
SOMETHING DONE
SOMETHING OUT
We work between source texts and target texts. Those can be easily documented, dissected and analyzed. It's the step in between that is the mystery of the work that we do... the SOMETHING DONE part of interpreting... because it happens in our head and it is hard to document, dissect or analyze. There isn't much that I can tell you to make your processing easier, faster, or better. That's the lifelong challenge for every interpreter. It's the basis for my favorite Marina McIntire quote. I remember her saying several years ago in Long Beach, California "Interpreting is Impossible.... so Get Better!"
So in the mystery of how we get better, I just want to emphasize that mental stress can result in physical stress. When we are processing a message that we are struggling to understand our body reveals the truth of the situation and our shoulders raise, our signing space gets higher, our facial expression reveals our mental stress. So here is my overall surefire solution for beating mental stress. When the speaker is talking TOO FAST, start SIGNING SLOWER! Yup... another counter-logical approach. You can ask the speaker to slow down... I have yet to see a speaker who is asked to slow down STAY SLOWED DOWN for more than thirty seconds. It's a losing battle. Fight a different one. Figure out how to represent their meanings rather than their words and you will find that you have plenty of time. Keep using your microbreaks to reinforce your processing depth.
I want to emphasize that I refer to this as processing depth and not processing time. Time really is not relevant. If I am understanding a message well, I can probably generate it as fast or even faster than the speaker. There are many times that I finish the sentence before they do. I have learned to be careful because sometimes they don't finish because they want the students to finish for them (and I just told all the Deaf students the answer). But most of the time when I am understanding the message and I catch up to the speaker I will go ahead and finish my ASL version of the sentence before they finish the English version and then I take a MACRO-BREAK to celebrate.
You can increase your processing depth by knowing the elements that surround the communication. The more you know the TOPIC, the SPEAKER, the AUDIENCE, the ENVIRONMENT and the BACKGROUND KNOWLEGE shared between the participants, the more likely you will be able to process the communication deeply and generate a target text that is equivalent both in meaning and emotional impact to your target audience. And then for the 90% of the time when we DONT have all of that information, use your microbreaks to think about the meaning in the source text so that you can generate ONE VERSION of it CLEANLY and CORRECTLY and take another microbreak before you do it all over again.
So let's document what we have learned today. Get your cell phones out one more time and get set to video record each other. We are going to finish the Malcolm Gladwell text. I am going to shout out reminders to your to PUT YOUR ARMS DOWN, BREATH, BALANCE YOUR WEIGHT, and PROCESS. I want your team members to watch for extraneous movement to DISTAL or EXTENDED locations and encourage you to sign in your normal signing space, or SIGNING ENVELOPE as we call it at NTID. Alright you should be ready for this next segment by now. So here we go:
Malcolm Gladwell: "At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce.And then he analyzed the data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said,let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy and there are people who like it extra chunky.
And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time, in the early 1980s,if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said yes! (Laughter) And Prego then went back,and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce,and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.
And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" And that's when you started getting seven different kinds of vinegar,and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil -- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are -- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter) That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people.
Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat -- what will make people happy -- is to ask them.And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say,"What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter)
People don't know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." It's a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desiresand tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you.Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want -- that "I want a milky, weak coffee." (Laughter)
So that's number one thing that Howard did.Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it's another very critical point -- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation. Why is this critical? It's critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early '80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right?Used to be, there were two mustards. French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit,much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California.And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way the French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he's eating the Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!
And everyone's take-home lesson from that wasthat the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that's wrong!Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane.There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks."
OK... switch roles... you should have figured out how to use the video camera functions by now so you might actually get a recording this time... here we go:
Malcolm Gladwell: "Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that?For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction, right? They don't say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the -- no! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say,"You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant."
Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended, it's thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus. Which had no visible solids, right?Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over itand it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached to that?Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A, and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people.
And the reason we thought that -- in other words,people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don't want to know how necessarily --just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.
I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is -- oh, I'm sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food,we aren't just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78.The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.
Now, first of all I want you to recognize that you probably interpreted differently this second time as compared to the first time and maybe you didn't even panic about how to talk about "Mustard" or how to spell "Grey Poupon"... maybe, if you remembered my instructions earlier, you didn't even try to spell "Grey Poupon" because I told you that we were NOT interpreting for a balanced bilingual but rather for a Deaf person completely fluent in ASL but only marginally fluent in English. Your consumers will have real needs one way or another, so whatever advice of mine you incorporate into your work, be sure that your work is still USEFUL to your consumers.
At some point I want you to compare your video recordings... compare these two versions of yourself and see which version of you YOU like better. Which version of you makes more sense? Which version of you is easier on the eyes? Which version of you do you want to reinforce? Which version of you hurts less? Maybe I've wasted your time today... but I think for most of you, I might have helped you to do your work better, more efficiently so that you can stay in the field as long as you want to. I'd appreciate your feedback over the next year. Please visit the HandAndMindPublishing Blog on Blogger.com to give me those comments. You can link to it from my website - www.handandmind.org
