I went to VinExpo to work as an interpreter from 25-27 May, 2010. It's been fun and it's the FIRST time I did interpretation in French, English, Mandarin and Cantonese, to be honest, I was quite nervous since my french level is still not as fluent as I want it to be. Luckily, my bosses were both very nice and patient. You will see them in the photos below. The region I worked for is Rhone which is located in the south of France, the Rhone River.
The booth area I worked for.
I was assigned to two small booths so I had 2 "bosses", this is Dirk, who's a former race car driver, that's why you can see his decoration of the booth is a flag which car racing uses. And he's from Belgium originally, but now resides in France making wines with his family, he's been making wines for about 10 years now. His winery is called LePlan Winery. A very nice and interesting guy, since his mother tongue is Flemish, so I spoke to him in English because French is not his native language anyway, of course he does speak fluent French.
These are the booths in front of ours, and you can see the decoration is quite different.
My other bosses at the next booth, Mdm Poisson, a very nice French lady who speaks very good English as well. And I did most of my interpretation for her in French, unless she really had difficulty understanding me. The monsieur here is the boss of this winery, his name is M.Paly (I hope I got the spelling right), he's often not at the booth, so didn't have much chances to talk to him, and he does have quite a strong accent when he speaks. :P
This is the Sopexa booth.
Overall speaking, it's been a good experience, and in fact, this is the third time I did VinExpo, but the first to do interpretation in French (I do think I need to work a lot harder to improve my French proficiency though,both grammar and vocabulary), it's not very tiring, and had wines to drink every day, what more can you ask for! Haha!
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