Lost in Translation

I haven't said much thus far about my employers in Taiwan. At first, I felt it better not to say much about them, as anything negative I said might be found and read by them. But in the two weeks since my arrival, I have realized that their English is probably not up to the task of reading anything I might post about them on a blog. By this, I do not mean that they do not understand the niceties of English provided by Messrs. Strunk and White, or that they lack the ability to identify the future perfect progressive ("I shall have been working"). I mean that they lack basic fluency in English.

My employers are two sisters-in-law, Ruby and Eve, who have opened a new franchise of Shane, one of the larger and more reputable bushibans in Taiwan. They are both about fifty and, from what little I have been able to gather, they opened the franchise hoping that it would provide them security in their golden years. I suppose their English is better than that of Taiwanese people. But it is not, in my view, anywhere near sufficient to be in a business that requires working in close quarters with native speakers who speak not a word of Chinese.

Ruby is a teacher of Chinese literature at a local high school. Eve, as near as I can tell, has some kind of background in elementary education. But neither really speaks English with any fluency. Ruby, for instance, usually fails to use gendered pronouns correctly--everyone gets referred to as he, regardless of sex, causing me quite a bit of confusion when, speaking of Eve, she says, "he will do...". There are a whole series of quite common verbs and expressions she gets mixed up--I don't think she quite understands the difference between living somewhere (permanently) and staying somewhere (on vacation or while transacting business). Eve's English is somewhat better, but she frequently apologizes for her poor English skills.


A bit of background before I explain what has me writing about this tonight. When I first accepted the position for which I came to Taiwan, I was told to apply for a 60-day tourist visa, which would be exchanged for a proper residency visa and work permit once I got here. I had expected Shane to send me an inbound and outbound paper ticket to be used for these purposes, but the packet sent to me had only an outbound ticket, from Taipei to Hong Kong, for December. By this point, I had purchased my "real ticket" to come to Taipei from New York, and so I dutifully went to the TECO office with these tickets to obtain a visa.

I was turned down, I supect, because the flight dates were not within 60 days of each other. I had purchased my "real ticket" before I got this packet and so didn't have an outbound flight date to work with. After being turned down, I spoke with the recruiting agency with whom I was working--I had no contacts at Shane at this point--and was advised to go apply in Boston or Washington. This was a week before my flight date, and I really had neither the time nor the money to run up and down the East Coast on what I suspected might be a fool's errand. So I told the recruiter I would come on a 30-day landing visa and make a visa run to Hong Kong in order to apply for a residency visa from there once my landing visa expired.

Before leaving for Taipei, I had to exchange the outbound ticket for Hong Kong, as its date was not within 30 days of my arrival, and I thought Taiwanese immigration might not let me into the country if my flight out was in less than thirty days. I made the exchange online and discarded the paper ticket I had been sent, as it was no longer of any value. When I went to Taipei last week, I explained all of this to someone in the Teacher Welfare Department at Shane, who told me it was not a problem and I shouldn't worry about it.

But today, Ruby and Eve started the process of making arrangements for my visa run, and boy did we run into translation issues around all of this. After Ruby had purchased a ticket online for me, she told me I would need to present the original, 30-day paper ticket in Hong Kong to get a 30-day visa in Taiwan.

Well, this set off all kinds of alarm bells in my mind. First of all, I thought I was going to Hong Kong to apply for a residency visa, not another d****d 30-day tourist visa. I asked specifically about what kind of visa I should apply for--in very simple English. Her reply to this was complete silence. Finally, she had to call someone at Shane, who explained to me that, no, I would be going to Hong Kong in order to obtain a tourist visa. Hopefully this would be a 60-day tourist visa, but if I couldn't obtain that, I would have to come back in on a landing visa--and possibly make another trip to Hong Kong. She said that Eve and Ruby's franchise was still applying for its registration as a new English school, and so couldn't apply for my residency vis and work permit.

All of this traveling back and forth to Hong Kong is, you guessed it, on my nickel. So I had sharp words with this woman, telling her that if have to make a second visa run to Hong Kong, I expect Shane to pay for it, as this second run would be caused solely by their failure to get things together on their end. I gave the phone to Eve, expecting this woman at the Welfare Office would translate all of this into Chinese for her benefit. I have no idea whether she did or not, as this issue was not discussed among us for the remainder of the evening.

Finally, my flight to Hong Kong was booked, and Ruby told me again that I would have to present the paper ticket I had been sent in my packet in order to get back into Taiwan. I told her that I no longer have that ticket, as I had done an exchange online to get into the country. This was completely lost on her, and resulted in another call to Shane's head office in Taipei for translation. I explained the situation to another Taiwanese national whose English was not quite fluent, and she said she would have the Welfare Office contact us tomorrow.

Maybe I expected too much, but I never thought a school purporting to teach English would be run by people whose own English was not up to handling these kinds of situations. But we have these kinds of communication snafus on an almost daily basis. During the course of all of this negotiation tonight, I requested of Eve the phone number of the head office in Taipei, so that I could initiate a call and try to straighten out communication issues when need be. That resulted not in Eve's giving me the number, but in her dialing it.

On the other hand, at long last I actually have my teaching schedule. So far, 14 "contact hours" (in EFL parlance, this refers to actual time in the classroom) are on my schedule, but there are several students who have signed up for lessons who still need to be assessed for placement, and it's likely a couple more classes will be added to this is in short order.