Are You Listening?

What's that sound? I think I hear the opening of doors of opportunity. Yes, it may be new ways for those with multiple language skills to use them for professional advancement. Within a very few remaining days, our website, www.interpretersgroup.com, will be open to accept employment ads for our membership in the Directory. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out and register yourselves as interpreters. The website will look very different soon, but the Registration and Directory pages are the same. Stay tuned!

Pan's Labyrinth

While watching this strange misfire, I couldn't help thinking about the beloved children' classic, The Wizard of Oz. What if, I mused, Dorothy had seen a group of uniformed Nazis goose-stepping down the yellow brick road. Or, if the Nazis had tied the cowardly lion to a tree and tortured him with razors. Well, if those images whet your appetite, you may enjoy Pan's Labyrinth.

It's not that the filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, is untalented. A lot of technical skill went into this project, which tells of a young girl in fascist Spain near the end of the Second World War. The girl's mother, a widow, takes up with a brutal career soldier, known only as The Captain. She becomes pregnant with his child and, along with her daughter, who is just entering puberty, comes to live with him until the child is born.

The film interweaves scenes of the Captain's relentless pursuit of Communist partisans (here simply called "the reds"), which are brutally realistic, with scenes of the girl's fantasy adventures with a faun, or goat-man, who tells her she is the daughter of the King of the Underworld, and must return there after performing dangerous tasks. The girl obeys because she believes her mother would die if she did not.

If this sounds like an uplifting children's adventure, it doesn't play that way. The back-and-forth technique makes for some very clumsy transitions, and the wartime melodrama is just ugly, "bad guy/ good guy" stuff. The actress playing the young girl, obviously talented, must have been cautioned never to smile, thus conveying pathological tendencies more than the magical perspective of childhood.

It is very difficult to portray complex reality from the point of view of a child. In 81/2 and Amarcord, Fellini was able to show how a child might view political and religious conflicts that went beyond his understanding. More recently, Miyazaki has shown that the fear and confusion of a girl's sexual awakening can be expressed with subtlety and imagination in animated form. This film, while admirably ambitious, lacks their artistry.

Starting Small

The Times had an intriguing little story (2/1/07) about a small, affluent community in Palo Alto, California. The district school board voted on -- and rejected -- a plan for a Mandarin immersion program for about 40 kindergarten and first grade students. A group of highly motivated parents wanted a "leg up" for the children, who would be facing an even more competitive and interactive world than the one they had to contend with. But many of the parents felt a little queasy about it, and I'm not sure why. The article briefly discussed the major objection: that only a few students would be given this privilege, and it was "undemocratic" to lock out the children of less affluent districts. One parent is quoted as saying "...a public school is supposed to be a public school."

Can't argue with that. And taxpayers are supposed to provide equal opportunities for all children. But they don't, and there is no law that can force them to. In the meantime, however, the world is forcing even the best and brightest of us to demonstrate excellence. The immersion program may have turned out to be a fiasco; we'll never know. But if it accomplished even a small measure of its goals, that works to the benefit of all children because it refines the working model for teaching foreign languages at the youngest age level. We don't have enough information about that yet.

As we say at Interpreters' Group: "Don't be afraid to lead the way!"