I was ready. Genuinely ready.
I had studied for days, in Portuguese, my first language, and I still had to study it like an exam, because the way I think, write and present lives in English. Yes, I have an accent. A lovely one, if you are wondering. A little nasal, American meets Australian meets Brazilian meets my Formula 1 speed of talking. But I went to university in English. I learned to present in English. I am not particularly good at presenting, but at least I know which language to panic in.
So I prepared in Portuguese. I highlighted all the words, every single one, and at some point highlighting stopped being a study technique and became a cry for help.
Then, at the last minute, someone asked whether I could do it in English instead.
Absolutely, I said, and went to look for the English-speaking department of my brain, which was closed for maintenance. It had spent days organising its little folders, memorising its sentences and putting on a respectable outfit, and English was not on the agenda.
But fine. We were doing this.
So there I was, presenting with Laise, wanting to bring some depth to our discussion about parenting abroad. I wanted to talk about how our experiences differed, including the fact that Laise has Japanese heritage, and I am a white Brazilian woman whose family tree, it seems, covers every corner of Europe.
Then Laise said pessoas amarelas all week.
And my brain, which had been doing a reasonably good job of keeping me alive until that point, opened an emergency meeting.
Okay. How do I say that in English? Asian? I usually say Asian. But she said pessoas amarelas. So do I say yellow people?
Yellow people.
No. Absolutely not. You cannot stand in front of an audience of intercultural professionals and say that.
But it is literally what the words mean.
Lots of things are literally true and still a terrible idea.
Wait. Yellowface. There is a book called Yellowface.
Excellent. We have established that yellow is a dangerous word. Very productive meeting, everyone.
Meanwhile, my mouth was still moving.
This is the problem with presenting in a second language: your mouth has one job, your brain has a completely different one, and occasionally the two departments stop communicating. I started switching between words mid-sentence, desperately looking for an acceptable option while speaking as though I had any idea what I was doing.
I did not.
I could feel my soul detaching itself from my body. It was not even making a scene. It was gathering its belongings and heading for the exit.
This is it, I thought. This is how I get cancelled at SIETAR, over a translation. My professional reputation was about to be taken down by Google Translate, except Google Translate was not even involved.
So I kept going, soul and all, and finished the presentation.
Afterwards, I called Laise and asked whether I had crossed a line.
She said no.
I said, "Oh, thank God."
And that was it. There was no emergency meeting of the intercultural ethics committee, and nobody removed me from the Zoom call. As far as I could tell, nobody had noticed. I had spent an entire section of my presentation having a personal, professional and possibly spiritual collapse, and everyone else had apparently been listening to the talk.
Honestly, rude. I had put a lot of effort into that crisis.
My soul returned to my body, exhausted and deeply unimpressed with my management skills.
What I learned, apart from the fact that I should highlight fewer things, is that a word can be routine in one language and carry very different associations in another. In Brazil, amarela is one of the five categories of colour or race used by IBGE, the national statistics institute, alongside branca, preta, parda and indígena, and people declare it for themselves. Translated word for word into English, it can sound jarring or carry associations nobody intended. Knowing what a word means is not always the same as knowing how it will sound to the person hearing it.
Laise's answer was about her. I do not know how every person the word describes feels about either term, and I would rather ask than guess.
I was so determined not to say the wrong thing that I nearly short-circuited in front of an audience of people who study intercultural communication. There is probably a professional development opportunity in there somewhere. I would prefer one that does not involve public speaking.
What I did learn is that when I am unsure, asking the person I am talking about is far more useful than letting my brain convene a tribunal in the middle of a sentence. Laise answered and I listened. That sounds very straightforward when I write it down at home, in the language I chose, with nobody watching.
Next time, I will prepare better, and I will highlight fewer words. Probably.
Has your brain ever decided, while you were speaking another language, that one perfectly ordinary word was going to ruin your entire life? What was the word, and did your face keep the crisis private, or did everyone get a front-row seat?
Please tell me I am not the only person whose brain has threatened to end a career over vocabulary. I would love to hear it in the comments. 💛
Jessica Gabrielzyk
