She is considered the first lady of the Czech translation. However, the speaker is said to use an unknown word. “I’m not very familiar with everything. Some of the guards might make fun of me, but you can get it wrong,” she admits, adding some of her own stories from her experience as a translator.
Dana Hapova, translator | Photo: Elena Horalkova
“My colleague and I interpreted Madeleine Albright’s funeral, where even the speeches were funny because she was a funny woman. And US President Joe Biden remembered how I made pasta for an Asian politician. And I thought, Why not, right? President Biden is a source of horror for the interpreters, because sometimes he commits wrong, or his pronunciation is worse, or he is tired,” notes translator Dana Hapova.
Guest: Translator Dana Hapova. Hosted by Alice Cibulka
I was like, ‘Does Madeleine Albright cook pasta? “Where were they both? Where were the pots there? Perhaps it was unofficial… Everything was going through your head at a terrible speed at that moment.”
But then I thought, Why not, politicians have strange ideas. Then another speech followed, perhaps President Bill Clinton, and he mentioned that Madeleine Albright was dancing the macarena more clearly. And at that moment he called me and I thought to myself: I gave it to her! Madeleine Albright made an eccentric chef! So she danced pasta with the governor,” laughs Dana Hapova.
“If he was at a conference, you could say: Sorry, that was incomprehensible. But you wouldn’t say that on TV,” the translator admits.
Surreal novel live
Hábová already had less fun translating in Colors of Ostrava, when a Dutch writer sat at the microphone in the middle of the afternoon and began reading from his book.
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“It just didn’t make sense. We, the interpreters, were sitting in the back, so we couldn’t even see him properly, but then it turned out he might have been reading from his new work, a surreal novel. But we didn’t get the documents. That was terrible. He read and read, “recalls Hapova and continues the story:
And it made me so angry, it seemed so unfair to me, that I went to him across the whole hall and made a gesture that suffices: ‘You realize that we are translating here, we don’t have the text at all, and it doesn’t work when it’s literature! He got scared and finished it, then apologized profusely,” adds Hapova.
Listen to the full interview in the audio.
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