Passed along for your edification, here is a TED Talk by a person whom I consider to be one of the most impressive human beings I have ever met on this planet. I've run into him twice, briefly. The first time, he was translating from Tibetan into English in Santa Fe for a visiting Tibetan Buddhist high lama, one of the Dalai Lama's mentors when he was young, later imprisoned in China and tortured every day of that imprisonment, later released and doing a tour of the world at the Dalai Lama's request. As impressive as this lama was (and he easily made my Top Five for the incarnation), his translator was almost as impressive.
Seeing this lama was one of my first exposures to Translation As Artform. I don't know if you have ever seen Tibetan teachers speak, and how their words are translated, but it's a fascinating experience. It's not the teacher saying a sentence, pausing while it's translated, and then speaking the next sentence. It's the teacher speaking for maybe five minutes at a time, completely free to craft his dharma talk the way he wants, without interruption, and the translator sitting there at his side listening. Just listening. No note-taking. Then, when the teacher "runs down" and pauses, the translator repeats what the teacher said in another language. ALL of what he said. Verbatim, just translated. Try to imagine the strength of mind and focus necessary to be able to do this. The next time I saw Matthieu Richard was in Paris. He was translating for the Dalai Lama, this time into French. I could have listened to the English translation over headphones, but having run into this guy before and seen him do his thing, I was curious enough as to how he'd do it and confident enough in my French to listen to him translating into his native language. It was an even more mindblowing experience. "Translation As Artform" is the closest I can come to describing it. So when this guy writes a book and gives a TED Talk, I figure he's worth listening to. If I were to rate my ability to focus and take advantage of the full resources of my mind on a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate myself about a 3. Based on seeing him do his thing only twice, I would rate Matthieu Richard as an 11. Based on that rating, I am passing along this TED Talk without having actually seen it yet. I just discovered it. But I'm confident that if this guy can do the job he does translating the words of others, when he speaks for himself it might be worth listening to. http://www.ted.com/speakers/matthieu_ricard.html <http://www.ted.com/speakers/matthieu_ricard.html> Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill <http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Guide-Developing-Lifes-Important/dp/184\ 3545586/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277505888&sr=1-1>
