A lot of things happened in the company that year, but one of the things that had the biggest impact on me was the visit of the German expert group. On the day of their arrival, the company's top management and several departments in the office building had a brief welcome ceremony. It was just in time for the company's 30th anniversary celebration, which was held on the third day of their arrival, and for various reasons, it was finally decided to visit the factory on the first day, free to wander around the city on the second day, and after the anniversary celebration on the third day, there would be a dinner. The dinner was not in the hotel, but in the grand conference hall on the company's campus. Preparations for the celebration began half a year ago, and almost all of them were taken care of by Hai Linlin's department. The celebration plan was sent to each department one month before the start of the festival for the relevant parties to prepare. One of them needed a group of staff volunteers – the dinner attendants. Because it is within its own company, it can only be served by the staff of the company's park to serve food and service, and how to choose is difficult. For the sake of fairness, the company is very unfair to the parties regardless of who shows up at the service location that night instead of the dining location. The company's initial idea was to look for volunteers, but there weren't many volunteers willing to step up and help the company. In the end, I had to draw lots, except for the people who worked in the office building - because of their special work - and then sat at the tables in the first few rows. All of them had to be lucky, and there were seventy-five lucky "winners" – and I was one of them. Actually, when I first recruited volunteers, I signed up, so when I won the lottery, I was not full of complaints, but a little happy. I'd rather stand at the table and watch the people eating than sit at the table, partly because I don't like the kind of scene that looks like I can't let go of my hands and feet, and partly because I never drink, and it's hard to deal with when the leader goes to toast. In the end, the company still considered fairness and rewarded each employee who participated in the service with 300 yuan, which was paid together with the salary of the month.

At the dinner, I was in charge of two tables, one of which housed two German experts, one of whom was their team leader, and four of the seven people at the table were senior leaders of the company. The first time I heard about the chairman was from the staff, and his temperament reminded me of the mayor I met at the seashore painting a portrait of an old man whose skull had been cut off in the war. There are also three people, one is Hai Linlin, who carries a notebook and a pen, and a voice recorder from beginning to end. One of the remaining two people was a colleague from Hai Linlin's department, and there was another person I didn't know, until I heard them speak, I didn't know that that person was a specially invited German translator. I listened carefully to a few words, and I was impressed by her pure spoken language and accurate translation. I stood in the open space between the two tables in a polite manner, waiting to be served or to help them get something. I secretly glanced at Hai Linlin a few times to see what she was doing, hoping that when I looked at her, I would see her look at me again, but this situation did not come to chance, she never looked at me from beginning to end.

In the middle of the process, the female translator apologized and said that she had a very important call that needed to be answered, and left her seat. Her departure caused problems in the communication at the table, and several leaders and Germans had to stop talking. After a while, the German expert needed to drink water, and kept using his hands and mouth to make a drinking motion. At first, we all thought he needed beer, and when I gave him a full meal, he kept waving his hand to indicate that it was wrong. He uttered the word "water" in less pure English, but no one at the table seemed to hear clearly, until Helen said to me that he wanted to drink water. I also heard him say the word "water", but to be more sure, I leaned down and whispered in German if he needed water. He replied excitedly, and that's when I realized that the teapot on the table had long since run out of water. He looked at me blankly and asked me if I knew German, and I replied yes and went to fetch water for the teapot.

Actually, there was still one month left in the German course, and I had been studying there for more than two years, and the number of lessons was twice as large as that of the average student. During my studies, I had several visits to the German course, but I didn't happen to be there. So, for the first time at a banquet, I spoke to a German in German. I filled the cup in front of him with a kettle, and then put the kettle on the table, and he took two sips and said something to the chairman who was sitting next to him, and then the female translator came back and helped him translate.

My German expert had only a simple exchange, but my voice must have been heard by a few people at the table, including Helen, who looked at me with strange and curious eyes. And I continued to go back to my job, waiting to serve them. I also saw that Hai Linlin changed her old style and took the initiative to look at me a few times, and she will never forget the question she asked me when I painted her portrait seven years ago - what would I choose if I had to choose a foreign language to study.

The dinner lasted until 2:30 a.m., when we cleaned up the site and reorganized it into a meeting room for meetings and lectures, where the German experts would give training lectures at 9:30 a.m. the next morning. One hundred and thirty people from the company related to this technology were present, and Hai Linlin had everything ready, including voice recorders, laptops, and cameras, and sat in the front row on the left hand side and was ready to work at any time.

The problem continued with the German interpreter, who was taken to the hospital in a car accident and was fortunately fine. However, the training sessions must be conducted as usual. The company's leaders looked sad and dragged on until 9:40 a.m. without finding a new German translator. That day, as an important worker in the workshop, I sat near the end, and at first I didn't know why the training seminar was delayed, until Hai Linlin had some problem translating in standard Mandarin German in the microphone and was dealing with it. And she must have seen me – or thought of me, and I saw her go and say a few words to the leader in charge, and then walk towards me. When she came over, I already knew what was going to happen. I was afraid to meet her gaze and deliberately lowered my head, pretending not to notice her. She walked up to me, the same shampoo it smelled from seven years ago, poked me with her hand, and half-crouched in whispering my name in my ear.

"Lou Yuqi. She said softly.

It was the third time she had called my name, and like the previous two, it shook my body. I looked up and looked closely into her eyes, a pair of eyes all too familiar, which I had carefully drawn. Seven years did not make her eyes wrinkle, on the contrary, the years have made her eyes more attractive, I look fascinated, time seems to flow back to her, I am not in the conference room, but in the quiet studio seven years ago.

She spoke in a calm tone and told me what I needed to do, like a normal colleague. She first asked me if I knew German, and I said that I did, but I was not very proficient. She went on to talk about the problem she was facing—the need for a German translator, and when I told her that I wasn't very proficient in words, she didn't have confidence in me, and I could tell she was hesitant to give it a try. I stood up and told her that I could try it, and she took me to the leader. The leader was anxious and kept calling the translation company to send other German translators, but to no avail. The leader spoke in a dignified tone and asked me how my German was. It's too big a question to be answered in macro terms, and I just told him two words: "Okay." He asked me if I had any experience as an interpreter, and I told you the truth: it was the first time I had spoken to a German at the dinner table last night. He was not very comfortable with me - I didn't have the confidence, I wanted to excuse myself, and then go back to my seat and wait for the leader to reluctantly announce the dismissal of the meeting. And at the critical moment, Hai Linlin's interjection made me undertake this task.

"Can you memorize Faust?" she asked.

It was a piece of cake for me. I glanced at her, and then recited the first thirty lines of Faust in German that my German teacher had said I had an apple-like accent, without the slightest mistake — just with a strange accent. To my surprise, I was in the library and told Helen that I wanted to read Faust, not memorize it, and seven years later, she knew like an unknown prophet that I was reciting Faust.

The leader thought it was good, and asked the German expert to communicate with me a few words, without any difficulty, and the nod of the German expert also made the leader determined to send me to the field. So, the first time I actually used German was to work as a live translator. At first, I was nervous, I was worried that I would not be able to do a good job, but it was not the most serious, but I was afraid that there would be some translation mistakes that would have a significant impact on my colleagues and their work. But when the training session began, I realized that I had overestimated the difficulty of the translation. At first, I thought that the terms of the machine and technology would stump me, but the German expert's presentation was so beautiful and meticulous that I just looked at her presentation and listened to him, and many of the problems that I thought would be difficult at first were solved. In addition, a lot of what he said was something that I often encountered in my previous work, and sometimes I could guess what he was going to talk about next.

The whole translation process was very smooth, I only stopped three times, and the German expert explained it to me carefully, and I was able to get the translation right very quickly. The German expert had a cheerful personality, and his speech was full of expressions, sometimes dancing, and from time to time he made everyone laugh with humorous words. There was a word that was very funny to say in German in that environment, but there was no laugh at all when translated in Chinese, and when he saw the scene of no one in the audience laughing after my translation, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled bitterly at me. I took the microphone and privately explained to him why the audience wasn't laughing, and it dawned on him. His emotions drove me, and I was more open to interpreting in the afternoon, often imitating his movements, or saying a few sentences that he had not said, but could be added to the translated sentences.

Due to the needs of her work, Hai Linlin occasionally gets up from the record to take pictures. She took dozens of close-ups of the German experts, then walked up to me and pointed the camera at me, and I saw that it was a 50mm prime lens, and it needed to be close to the target. The flash flashed seventeen or eighteen times with the sound of the shutter before she returned to her seat and buried herself in the recording again. When she pointed the camera at me, I had a feeling that she could look at me from the camera in a big and undisguised way, while I could only see her closed eyes outside, and there was no discomfort. At that moment, I wanted the two of us to switch places. In the end, I thought to myself that since I was slaughtered by others, I might as well perform well, so the body language of the translator was more abundant, so that she could take enough pictures at one time.

I was honored by that translation and established a friendship with the German expert, who often contacted me by email and social media after he returned home. In the evening, the chairman of the board of directors hosted a banquet for the German experts at the hotel and thanked them for increasing the knowledge of the company and its employees. I, as their official translator, did not have the slightest free time. It wasn't until the next day that they were taken to the airport, and when the German expert who was speaking that day went through security, he turned around and hugged me, thanked me for my help, and said that I was welcome to Germany. What impressed me the most was that on the morning he went to the airport, he first went to the city's largest antique market, and saw a tile, and the stall owner asked for 50,000 yuan. I know there's nothing real about it, but the German expert says he likes the tile very much. So, I told the stall owner about the price to 50, which surprised the German expert, who said that he would give me a gift when he returned to Germany. A month later, he sent me a famous brand fountain pen and five boxes of ink galleries from Germany.

Afterwards, I was praised and remembered by many of my colleagues, but before that, no one knew that I was learning German – and that I could speak it – except for the one I had impersonated to publish a reader's contribution in the Blue Star. The leader talked to me about this incident, and he asked me a lot of questions, which were much more detailed than the interviewer asked when I came to the company for an interview, and I felt like I had redone a more thorough interview. The conversation lasted three hours and took half a working day. In the end, he said that my talents should not be buried, but should play a greater role.

"You should be working in this building. He said, "This is the place for you." ”

He said that he wants to make the best use of his employees, which is a good thing for both employees and the company. At that time, I was in a workshop team that was working on a major job, and I said I could wait for that job to be done and then I would be ready to move around.