Wonderworld of Words

Sometimes it feels as if we were drowning in words.

The interpreter is, in a way, helpless in the face of an avalanche: sounds, acronyms, home-made abbreviations, words sometimes strung together at random, long-winding sentences, insider jokes or allusions, dialects, idiosyncrasies and so on and so forth.

We rise to the challenge (most of the time), but if a speaker says “union” instead of “unique”, or “lodger” instead of “lawyer” – what can we do?