I was interpreting in Kuwait in 1986, with 50 Chinese (from different provinces) and 50 Arabs (from the various Gulf states) looking up at me on the podium.
I was interpreting for No.2 man in the State Council of China when he was giving his speech.
As usual, the Chinese love stats, so I thought I was being clever pre-empting him/this by writing out on an A4 sheet of paper the numbers in Western clusters (in 3s) and in Chinese clusters (in 4s), as a quick visual aid for conversion when I was up there on the podium looking down at 100 faces.
As predicted, he trotted out figures left, right and centre: "We signed up deals of ... million/billion USD with x, y and z", blah blah blah, on and on and on, example after example. He was spewing out the stats so fast I was struggling with the conversion after 5 or 6 sets of stats.
I was so overwhelmed at one point (my brain was frying), when yet another huge figure was trotted out, that I gave up and said to the 50 Arabs : "A LOT, A LOT of money."
I still laugh at the memory, and it creases my students up too, whenever I tell them the story to make them feel better for not converting their numbers fast enough. (I'm always happy to tell stories about my mistakes and failures to make the students feel less "stupid" — a word they often use to describe themselves when it comes to learning Chinese.)
(Kuwait, 1986)
For those who don't already know and are interested, Chinese numbers work in clusters of 4:
(Western) ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL
ABC = billion cluster (100bn, 10bn, 1bn)
DEF = million cluster of 3 (100mn, 10mn, 1mn)
GHI = thousand cluster of 3 (100K, 10K, 1K)
JKL = unit cluster of 3 (100, 10, 1)
(Chinese) ABCD, EFGH, IJKL
ABCD = yì 億 / 亿 cluster of 4 (thousand-yì hundred-yì ten-yì one-yì)
EFGH = wàn 萬 / 万 (= 10K) cluster of 4 (thousand-wàn hundred-wàn ten-wàn one-wàn)
IJKL = thousand, hundred, ten, one
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