CYA The importance of a proper knowledge of abbreviations

Once I (Mirek) was serving as an interpreter during a meeting, rather important to the company that employed me. It was a middle level conference, there were three bosses on our side and three on American/English side.

In fact all important topics were already agreed and signed, documents printed, we were only discussing details. As we were going down the list of items and gleefully in agreement and acceptance , one after another, our American partner Pamela was adding some documents to the report, nodding and saying “CYA.”, her assistant also was nodding and saying “C.Y.A.”, same with their English partner Elliott. After third or fourth repetition of such a situation, we could not stand the state of oblivion and with some hesitation I dared to ask ‘what does CYA mean ?

They were laughing out loud for some while and then Pam explained that this was standard practice to support topics with proper signed documents that is “cover your a**”.

I told it to our crew, there was a little silence and then we were laughing a little longer than they had laughed. And when Pam asked why, I told her in Poland we rather used “PYA” protect your a**” (in Polish “chron swoja d***”) because only covering is sometimes NOT enough. We were then all laughing a while.

And after we had agreed that point we could continue our job.

Tags: CYA, language, lost in translation, translation