Imagine that you are a professional musician working every day and never playing the same piece of music twice.  Each evening you show up at the auditorium in your black tux and on a screen, you are shown only one note at a time, in rapid succession, not a standard piece of music with the entire score laid out before you.  The audience paid top dollar for your services and expects a quality performance.  You must play “cold”, yet with a smooth flow and dynamic features that match the composer’s intent.  Since you are privy to only one note at a time and have no idea when the conductor might alter your path, your musical automaticity must be perfect in order to play spontaneously.  Could you do it?  Every day?

The life of a Cued Language Transliterator is much like the above scenario.  We do some prep work when available:  perusing textbooks, reading newspapers, scanning power point slides, watching the DVD of “Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” 53 times in 4 days.  But the bulk of our job is one note at a time, revealed in rapid succession as people produce the phoneme combinations that we call “spoken language.”  In the ear and out the hand, as spontaneously as a professional musician who reads the notes and then plucks the corresponding strings or presses the correct valves.  We train for our jobs, but much of life is unrehearsed banter that must be transliterated immediately with appropriate prosody and without filters or prep time.  We do this every day.  It’s beautiful music.