The Two-Story Translator

This particular landscaping company has a long, sordid history of being very much against the idea of providing translators for their new-hires. The fact that I speak no Spanish is not unknown to them. I don’t know why they refuse to send translators; it’s not like they don’t have any on-hand. Many of the Mexican workers who come in for a drug test are bilingual already, how hard would it be to call one over and send him out with a new-hire to make sure the drug test goes down properly.

Any way you slice it, I can’t do the collection. I have no choice but to turn the young lady away.

She returns after lunch with an employee of the same company. I ask him if he is going to serve as translator. He nods and says “okay”.

“Okay” is a red-flag word. It’s deceptively easy to get through a conversation by just nodding and saying “okay” whenever the person you’re listening to pauses in their speech. I lob a couple lowball questions at the translator to test his English capabilities. As it turns out he knows precious little English at all. not even enough to help the young lady tell me her phone number. Again I have no choice but to turn them away.

Ten minutes before closing time they return, this time accompanied by a white woman who very obviously works in the air-conditioned part of the company’s dealings. “Hi,” she says impatiently, “is there some problem here?”

I explain to the woman, just like I have to various other members of her company, over and over again, that I do not speak Spanish and I can not conduct a collection unless the donor speaks English.

“Well all she has to do is pee in a cup right?”

Sigh. It’s the “only a drug test” argument. I wonder how this woman would react if one of their landscaping crews uprooted someone’s flower bed. Somehow I doubt she’d respond with “Well it’s only your front lawn right?”

I briefly explain the process, the do-not-flush thing, the empty-your-pockets thing, and I show her the block on the form the donor needs to sign.

Now, I have no illusions that everyone who comes in for a drug test actually reads the form before signing it. Most people are so jaded that they just sign anything and everything you point to. My personal take on the issue is that if you have the ability to read it, and decide not to, that is your thing. But if you do not have the ability to read it, it’s my job to ensure you know what it says before you sign. I meet a lot of people who are illiterate, or who don’t have their glasses, or speak English perfectly well but can’t read it, and to those people I cheerfully read the two lines of text aloud. But in the case of foreign language translations, nothing short of an actual bilingual translator can get the job done. This solution, while painfully obvious to me, continues to elude the landscaping company in question and specifically the increasingly-irritated woman standing before me.

“Well, why can’t he translate?”

I shrug, and look at the translator again, and ask him in plain English, “Sir, are you able to translate for me?”

He blinks a few times and then looks at the supervisor woman, helplessly.

She repeats what I said, except louder and slower. When that doesn’t work, she rewords it as “Can you talk English? To him? Like this?” She holds up one hand and pantomimes a mouth opening and closing, while pointing to her own mouth with the other hand.

He nods and says “okay.”

“There,” says the supervisor, “what’s the problem?”

The problem is that I’m not fooled. The problem is that I’m not a complete retard. The problem is that your goddamned company wants to capitalize on the cheap labor offered by a Mexican work force (illegal or otherwise) and the tax benefits of getting them all drug tested without accepting the responsibility to get it done properly.

The part of the form the young lady is eventually going to have to sign, I ask the translator to read to me in English. He can’t get passed the second word (the first word is “I”). It is so painfully obvious that this man, excellent landscaper though he may be, simply does not speak English and simply can not serve as a translator. A five-year-old could see it.

“Ma’am,” I tell the supervisor, “unless you speak Spanish and can translate, I am going to have to discontinue this collection process.” That’s a polite way of saying “get the hell out of my office, it’s after five and I want to go home.”

“What if I help him with the things he doesn’t understand?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can translate for him.”

“You’re going to translate for the translator?”

“He’ll listen to me.”

I envision in my mind the kind of work environment this woman deals with. She is probably highly skilled at getting a crew of Spanish-speaking workers where they need to be, doing what they need to get done, and doing it very efficiently. But outside of her little landscaping world, things don’t work like that. It’s easy to hand a rake to someone, point them at a pile of leaves, and let them figure it out. What I do at my office is something different entirely.

“So you want to translate for me, and then have this man translate for you.”

“Can we hurry this up please?”

“But he doesn’t speak English.”

“He does, you say he doesn’t, whatever.”

“And you don’t speak Spanish.”

“He’ll listen to me.”

I walk out, take my OPEN sign off the window, and turn off the lobby lights. “Okay,” I tell her, “we’ll give it one shot. If it doesn’t work you’re going to have to send her back tomorrow with a proper translator.” I realize that statement is meaningless to her, so I follow up by explaining that a translator is someone who is bilingual, and can hold conversations in two different languages (in this case English and Spanish) be they verbal or written.

I give all my instructions. The supervisor repeats them louder, leaving out verbs, the way one would talk to a dog. The translator stumbles around with some clumsy Spanish. The donor looks very confused. Eventually the supervisor snaps the cup from my hand, gives it to the donor and points to the bathroom.

As she’s going in, I remind her not to flush the toilet. The helpful supervisor sums this up as “No this,” with a hand gesture that tries to mimic water circling a toilet bowl. To me it looks like she’s stirring soup.

Even through the language barrier, handing someone an empty cup and pointing them at a bathroom is a pretty easy message to get across. The donor emerges with a full cup, the sound of a freshly flushed toilet echoing through the hallway.

The supervisor is angry when I tell her it’s a botched collection. The donor did not follow my instructions because, despite having two translators at hand, she did not understand what they were. The supervisor barks at the donor to “drink aqua” as fast as she could so she could go again.

“No, ma’am, she will have to come back tomorrow with a proper translator.”

“She’ll get it right next time, she just–”

“It’s after five. I’m closed. She doesn’t speak English. You aren’t a translator. He isn’t a translator. This collection is over.”

I throw away the cup and break eye contact. The supervisor tries to protest but eventually just stomps out with her Mexican underlings in tow.

As for me, I still don’t speak Spanish.

The very next day the same man came in, supposedly sent to translate for a completely different new-hire. Something is seriously wrong with that company.