Bilingual People Share Their Greatest “I Didn’t Know You Spoke the Language” Stories

I’m the Translator

I was sitting at a communal lunch table for a big international event with coworkers who didn’t know me and didn’t know that I was their coworker. I just listened to them trash talk all sorts of people including my direct supervisor, his direct supervisor, and the unknown professional translator with the unbelievably stupid sounding name — Yuemeigui. They said all this in Chinese.

As they got up to leave, one of the English-speakers apologized to me for spending the whole lunch chatting in Chinese with her coworkers and asked me what I was doing at the event. They presumably assumed I was media or an early arrival (who for some reason was in the Staff Dining Room). “Hi,” I said, “I’m the translator. My name is Yuemeigui.” yuemeigui