A translator and interpreter since childhood, Sofie Schultz Christiansen told us about her story, her love of languages, her travels and her life in Ilulissat.
She’s on time; we were early. She enters the hotel lobby with a shy step. She’s wearing a thick fur coat. She takes a seat at our table by the window, facing the icebergs.
Sofie Schultz Christiansen is a translator and interpreter – for English, Danish and Greenlandic. For three years, she worked for the Greenland Parliament in Nuuk.
“During those three years, I traveled a lot. I went to Iceland three times, to Canada three times, once to New York in the United Nations building, to Tromsø in Norway, to Helsinki in Finland, to Verona in Italy” she proudly recounts. “At the time, most translators only worked in Danish or Greenlandic. I was one of the few to work in English,” she explains. She is now self-employed here in Ilulissat, where she was born, raised and worked as an interpreter for the local town hall for several years.
In the 1960s, she remembers the great bands of children playing in the city, their songs and games, and the seas frozen until June. With global warming and spring now arriving in April (icebergs are already in the water in front of our windows), she knows that her son won’t be able to experience the winters she did at his age.
She also remembers her Danish classmates, with whom she learned the language.
Moving to Nuuk
She soon confides that she’s a little worried that her son hasn’t learned Danish too. “He has a Danish father, but I brought him up on my own, so… I started to teach him a bit of the language when he was little, but we stopped. He has to learn Danish if he wants to continue his studies after elementary school,” she adds. She returns to this point several times during the conversation: “As he doesn’t speak Danish, his father and brothers speak English to him”. She worries that he won’t be able to continue his studies and enter the gymnasium (the non-compulsory equivalent of high school, where instruction is exclusively in Danish here in Greenland). She has therefore decided to move to Nuuk next year, when he leaves elementary school, to enable him, if he so wishes, to learn Danish. “There are more Danish speakers in Nuuk. I hope he’ll learn Danish there and go to high school (gymnasium) before choosing anything else.
On our phone, we hand him three old photos we’ve found on his Facebook account. “Would you be willing to choose one and comment on it?” we ask. “I can comment on all of them,” she replies resolutely. These are old silver photos, borrowing from the pastel tones of period photographs. In the first, we see her, aged four, standing in her traditional communion dress made by her grandmother. Looking a little embarrassed. “The photo isn’t very good. The photographer asked me to fold my hands like this. It looks like I’m praying,” she laughs, before adding delicately: “That’s not me…”.
In another image, her two grandparents, her mother’s parents, pose in front of a blue-gray wall on which the sun is reflected. They look away, each to one side of the off-camera, as if not to let the image catch them too keenly. His grandfather was Danish, but was raised in a Greenlandic family after the death of his parents. “They lived in a small village near Aasiaat,” she explains (a town in the far north of Greenland, now the country’s fifth-largest city). “We visited them every summer, after school was out. We had to fetch water in buckets. For the first few days, the buckets seemed very heavy, but by the end of our stay, we’d grown stronger and were helping the other houses in the area,” she recalls.
The icebergs are still there and the conversation ends. “Thank you very much,” we insist in English. “You’re welcome”, she replies in French. She laughs: “A few weeks ago, I accompanied a Frenchman who needed a translator. He’d always say ‘Qujan’ (thank you) in Greenlandic, and I’d reply ‘you’re welcome’ in French. A.C
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