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Interpreting jokes in real time is murderously difficult. Here’s a classic Japan story and then one from me: https://t.co/ifyz5KVpve
In very, very many of my presentations I tell a “fish out of water”story about living in Japan, to get a laugh during my brief life story before launching into the actual presentation content. And so I did that in this presentation as well.
The load bearing part of the story, about the awkwardness of being a foreigner sometimes, was this: “I don’t know which of us had it rougher, me or Ogaki tax office. Me in figuring out the regs, or the Ogaki tax office in dealing with person who looks like me and sounds like:”
This got laughter from the audience, as expected. It’s a fun joke with a few layers to it, not relevant here. But I was not able to speak to the interpreter beforehand to let her know it was coming, and felt bad about that, because this requires very high speed tapdancing.
This is probably the second most impressive thing I’ve ever personally seen an interpreter do while being able to appreciate what makes it impressive. The most was years prior, at a E-to-J interpretation of a sales pitch for a database product. I was in audience repping a buyer.
What did you hear when you heard that? I am an American with an engineering degree, and I heard “We have feature-by-feature compatibility.” This is approximately what the interpreter simul-translated, using a Japanese word which (unlike function in English) cannot mean “method.”
As a parenthetical aside two sentences later, without pausing, the speaker mentioned that for example they replicated Oracle’s quirks in parsing date time methods passed as arguments. The implication hit me, in my native language, 200 ms after the word CORRECTION hit my earpiece
I didn’t get to speak to the interpreter but did get a chat with the speaker, where I told him “Get her card and tell the agency you want her assigned to every exec doing a presentation in Japan and if you can’t get her you want someone she handpicks.”
As long as I’m talking about bilingual accounting stories here is one that is half that and half “men will remember any compliment a woman ever gives them until they die.” When running a business I got a call from prefectural tax office.
Business owners very seldomly interact with the prefectural tax office; you’re generally interacting with the city tax office on behalf of the national tax office. But they have one duty, which many owners resent, and the young lady started as quite apologetic about it.
After the usual preliminaries about whether I could speak Japanese (the answer to which she thankfully took at face value, which is not 100% among government representatives), she asked whether I was aware of self-employment tax.
Oh yes, quite aware, happy to pay 5% of profits subject to some calculation necessary. Apologies Mr. McKenzie there are actually several rates and so I need to ask some questions about the character of your business. I’m quite sure I qualify only for highest rate but fire away.
She gets through her questions, I answer. I’m terribly sorry Mr. McKenzie but it sounds like you will be taxed at the highest rate. There is an automatic deductible of X, so subtracting that from your profits, you have a taxable profit of Y, meaning you would need to pay Z.
Would that be acceptable, Mr. McKenzie? Err begging your pardon that is to say I am enthusiastically prepared to pay all taxes that my business owes but I have a slight comment to make about the calculation of these taxes. Of course sir I am happy to explain it to you.
Yes the automatic deduction is available for businesses that were in business the entire tax year but, as you are doubtless aware, it must be prorated for businesses which began mid-year. As the file says, I started on April 1st, and while I cannot do the mental math while…
… speaking in Japanese, I think I am required by law to prorate that exemption to approximately 3/4 of the number you just quoted, resulting in a slightly higher tax bill than you just quoted. Does this match your understanding? ten seconds of stunned silence and paper flipping
You might reasonably ask why I knew that and the answer is I Googled it but it was also in the colorful Welcome To Doing Taxes As A Sole Proprietor pamphlet the city tax office gave me when I stopped in to tell them that I would be doing that. I read the pamphlet, of course.