You must laugh now

This afternoon I gave a presentation on CMF and two of our current projects at a workshop hosted by Saath. The workshop was held at the Nehru Foundation, which has an amazing, green campus. I'd occassionally get distracted from the other presentations by a monkey that was sitting cross-legged in an eerily human manner, on a tree branch right outside the window next to me.

The presentations were in Hindi, Gujarati and English, though everyone made slides in English. This was my first time presenting with a translator and it made for an interesting experience. At times, the translator would paraphrase what I said and then translate what was on the slide. In a couple of cases, he actually got ahead of me. I wonder what exactly he was saying at times, as it didn't sound like what I had said.

All this reminds me of a story President Carter told when I heard him give a speech at Stanford back in 2003 or 2004. Shortly after leaving office, President Carter was touring some villages in Japan. He had some downtime during the visit and a local school approached him about speaking at their graduation. Not wanting to disappoint, Carter accepted and proceeded to craft his speech. After four years in office, Carter was used to giving speeches and having them translated. He was also aware that humor didn't always translate well, so he chose only one joke, which he whittled down to its most basic form.

At the graduation ceremony, President Carter gave his speech as planned. When he got to the joke, he listened as the abridged English version became even more brief when the Japanese translator recited it. The crowd roared with laughter -- a much better reaction than the joke had ever received before. President Carter was startled by the reaction and he approached the translator afterwards to find out exactly how he said it, so that he could improve the English version in the future.

At first, the translator was hesitant to say anything. Carter pressed on, eager to know how to ellicit such a positive response again in the future. Finally, the translator admitted, "When you told joke, I tell the audience 'President Carter said a joke. Everybody must laugh now.'"