Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 12, 1992 TAG: 9202120141
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SU CLAUSON CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
GOOD TRANSLATION
Elmira, El Paso, South Bend, Suffolk, Harrisburg, Harrisonburg - the itinerary of free-lance translator Eva Baer reads like a Greyhound Bus schedule.As an interpreter and guide for the U.S. Information Agency, Baer introduces the country's international guests to America's slice-of-life towns and cities, and sometimes the more exciting metropolitan areas, too.
After 14 years of escorting Hungarian and German visitors, Baer has an easier time naming the places she hasn't been than those she has. "I haven't been to Oklahoma, for instance," she says.
Baer, 58, usually leaves her Blacksburg home and husband to work three months a year. She says her job involves much more than translating verbatim the conversations among U.S. government officials, volunteer hosts and the visitors.
These visitors need to know how the United States works: its social customs, politics, economics, folklore and anything else that can form a gap between the hosts' words and her guests' knowledge. To explain these cultural oddities, she keeps up with several regional and national newspapers and news magazines.
She also draws comparisons from her own past as a native of Budapest, Hungary. She knows, for instance, that the middle-class U.S. rancher will be mistaken for a millionaire, his wealth measured in cows, and seeks to show her guests how U.S. citizens measure wealth in buildings, stocks and power. She knows many will be impressed simply by the relative abundance of goods in a small-town Kmart and by the fact that if people are dissatisfied with the quality of an item, they can return it for a full refund. "It seems like a fairy tale to Hungarians," she says.
Baer's guests have been carefully selected by the U.S. government, targeted as future opinion leaders. "No one can ask for an invitation; our government has to have reason to invite them," she says.
Many are politicians who later achieve prominent offices; others are engineers, writers, journalists, artists and civil servants. Apparently, they are more important to our government now; the number of U.S. Information Agency guests has doubled from 1,500 in 1982 to 3,000 last year.
They don't always come with a favorable attitude toward the United States or its people; a few Baer would even describe as narrow-minded. "Some people have criticized our government for paying these people's way, but [their] seeing the country always promotes more understanding.
"Now maybe Stalin or Hitler wouldn't have been completely different if they'd visited the U.S., but there's a belief here that in 30 days we can convert some to our ways," she says.
Baer learned English in India, where her father was working on an engineering project. A closet anti-communist, she began working as an interpreter for a communist youth conference when she was 16, the year the Communists came into power in Hungary.
"It was very stressful," she says. "People were always plotting against each other, and I had to be very careful what I said."
Which she sometimes wasn't. While she was attending the university, Baer criticized a classmate for writing a fawning article about Stalin. Her words came back to haunt her when the classmate brought her to trial at the university, a trial in which the outcome could have meant a concentration camp and persecution of her family. Her accuser overplayed her hand, but Baer's dissatisfaction led to her emigration in 1956. She notes sadly that in this small country, communist leaders sometimes resurface as leaders of the new government.
"One thing visitors notice right away is that Americans don't complain as much about their government. We here are more optimistic and more action-oriented. If we don't like something we change it. Eastern Europeans don't understand grassroots movements, like the man who campaigned against lawn darts and had them outlawed within a year. They wouldn't know how to organize that," she says.
Visitors also are pleasantly surprised at the generosity and friendliness of the American people. Volunteers who serve as hosts for her guests "are the most fabulous people," Baer says. "I am proud to be showing visitors America's best." But, Baer says, the internationals come away feeling somewhat less significant in this country. "They have remarked that their position matters very little here," Baer remarks. "One of the top Hungarian finance ministers will go away meeting only a few low-level workers in the Treasury Department. But later when we're interested in Hungary, a nobody will see the top people."
Visitors also have noticed a feeling of insularity, a lack of interest in foreign policy. "It's such a big, big country," Baer says. "They notice we're much more interested in domestic policy."
Baer's visitors are usually given a broad tour of the country in their area of interest, be it prisons, museums or communication systems. "I pack up and go to meet their planes, never knowing where I will be the next day."
After the visitor is briefed by government officials, the schedule is set. Baer says she sometimes gets visitors to come to Blacksburg "by whispering in their ears the night before" the briefing.
Jeno Fekete, from the Hungarian Department of Environmental Technologies, visited Virginia Tech and several innovative wastewater treatment projects designed by Blacksburg's Anderson & Associates engineering firm last fall.
Baer's next visitor, an authority of the Hungarian gypsies, probably will go to a more multicultural area such as Miami.
Escorting can be hectic business, especially because Baer doesn't like to drive. But the work is stimulating - Baer has met Michael Dukakis, Leonid Brezhnev and countless other statesmen. "When I'm so weary at the end of the day, I think, `Wouldn't you rather be here than back in Blacksburg cooking?' " she says.