Author Archives for Tulkur - Elisabet Tiselius

Day 07 My best colleague

First of all you have to define best. The one who is the best interpreter or the one who is the best supporter?
There are some really awesome conference interpreters out there. Interpreters who interpret so that you have the impression to listen directly to the speaker. And on top of that every single nuance or word is there. But if you are a splendid interpreter and does not help your colleagues your excellence is reduced to half. When you work in a booth, you are a team, and the team is not stronger than its weakest links as the defense guys like to put it. The listeners get the impression from one booth, not from individual interpreters. Therefore you need to act as part of the team, help your colleagues with terminology, be attentive to figures, help to find the right power point page and so on.

In community interpreting, you are not surrounded by colleagues. But your best colleagues are those who keep in touch, who are there to debrief, who supports you against interpreting agencies and so forth. As I have said earlier, interestingly enough the public service interpreting client seems to be more interested in an interpreter who is personal rather than neutral. Although that may not be desirable for other reasons (the interpreters social health among other things).

I have not met Erik Camayd-Freixas, but from what I have read about him it is a colleague I admire very much.

So, my best colleague is not a definition of how well somebody interprets (every professional interpreter have to live up to a certain standard of course), but rather how the interpreter acts as a colleague and a fellow human being. I have a colleague who is an excellent interpreter, a very warm person, extremely professional as a team member, and on top of that has energy left to be a committed teacher and mentor. I think that is my best colleague.

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.

Sociaal tolken in Flanders and Belgium

Through the Flemish news from De Redactie, I got the good news that the demand for public service interpreters “Sociaal tolken” is increasing in Flanders. Last year it was 43000 events compared to this years 50000. The figures seem fairly low to me, but I suppose it reflects the fact that although Belgium is the home of conference interpreting, community interpreting is not quite there yet. So, it is good news in the perspective that authorities are actually acknowledging the need for organising, training and providing community interpreters.

The Redactie also tells us that the interpreters are trained for the task, through role plays and other techniques. I looked up the training and found information from the Vlaams minderheden centrum here, and from the Centrale ondersteuningscel voor sociaal tolken en vertalen. The latter seems to be a special unit for community interpreting and translation at the Flemish centre for minorities.

For the French speaking community I can only find information about how to start working as a social interpreter, but not anything about training. Maybe somebody can enlighten me on this.

I have said in an earlier post that the use of community interpreting is not very well established in Belgium, I still believe that, but clearly after my research since yesterday, I have to admit that Belgium or at least Flanders makes progress in the area.

Day 06 A Day at Work

A day at work differs a lot if you are on a community mission or conference mission. Your community interpreting day will typically start with you gathering all your dictionaries and word lists (not too much though you will carry it around for the whole day), you will absolutely need a pen and your note pad (actually it may be better to have all that packed up the day before), you also need to know where you are going, names and possible contact numbers (sometimes places can be difficult to get in to). Once you’re ready off to, for instance, the court house.

If you’re lucky it’s a day long hearing and you don’t have to move around that much, otherwise you’re out of the court house after an hour usually (that’s fairly average for shorter law suits or cases, a witness hearing may be even shorter at least where I work), after that you’re off to a midwife for a pregnancy check-up. After the pregnancy check-up you hopefully have time for some lunch and then you’re off to the migration board for an information meeting for newly arrived refugees.

Usually there is little time to prepare, you are lucky if you get a file from the court. For medical appointments you usually just know the name of the person who booked you. Regular meetings at for instance the migration board are good, because usually you do them more than once and will know in general how they are done. You have very little contact with your colleagues, simply because as a community interpreter you rarely work in teams. This also means that you are pretty much on your own for terminology and so forth.

For a conference interpreting mission the day at work starts already a couple of days before your job. Longer before if you are not familiar with the topic, maybe just the afternoon or evening before if this is a routine job. When you start preparing you surf the internet, your read up on the topic, you make word lists and so forth.

The evening before you check all the practical details; where are you going, how long does it take you to get there (if you’re working out of town or out of the country you may be traveling the evening before), do you have your contract, dictionaries, power point etc. If the meeting is very specialized the speakers are usually kind enough to send you their power points.

You get to the meeting at least 30 minutes before you start. An interpreter is NEVER late. In my 15 years of interpreting I have never been late for a private market meeting. I have been late to meetings at different institutions a couple of times, mainly due to flight problems (snow, strike and so forth), it is of course just as inadmissible to be late to an institution, but usually they have a back up team of interpreters so it’s a little less damaging. On the private market you can ruin the whole meeting.

As you get to your meeting you take out all your aids, i.e. dictionaries, word lists, computer, note pad and pen. Pen is also a no, no to forget. You say hello to you colleagues, check last minute changes, have a coffee and… you’re on air.

In the booth you take turns with your colleagues, 15-30 minutes at a time. When you’re not on air, you have to maintain a certain level of concentration as you may need to help your colleague with different things such as; technical mishaps (the sound disappearing is a nightmare), terminology, difficulties to catch names, get the right page in a power point or document and so forth.

At lunch you just want a calm moment and a chat with your colleagues, sometimes it’s good to check terminology with your delegate. No interpreter loves to continue interpreting during lunch conversations and speeches, if interpreting is needed during lunch it is wise to provide extra time for interpreters to recover. You cannot be a top performer all day without proper resting time.

The afternoon you’re back in the booth with basically the same tasks as in the morning. Don’t forget to bring a cup of coffee to the booth for the grave yard slot, you know the first speaker after lunch when everyone is tired.

After a day of interpreting be it community of conference you are worn out. Of course you develop stamina after years in the business, but the fact is that it is a very demanding task where you have to stay alert and concentrate intensely for long periods of time. So what you are longing for after a day of interpreting is a bit of rest and… silence.

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.

Interpreting certification Norwegian

If you work as a community or liaison interpreter and you live in a country that has a certification exam you absolutely want to take that if it is given in you language. To be a certified interpreter gives you a professional label and it is of course a quality label. You have actually proven that you meet a certain professional standard.

Most exams are criticized for different reasons depending on the exam. The main reason for this is that interpreting is notoriously difficult to measure and test. But no matter whether the test is a 100 % apt or not it is still testing your skills and having passed it is a perfect way of promoting yourself.

In Norway the next certification exam this time is given for Bulgarian, Sorani and German. More information here.

Thank you Anne Birgitta for the tip.

Day 05 What is good interpreting

Well that is a million dollar question. There are as many definitions of good interpreting as there are interpreters, researchers, institutions and clients.
First of all as one of my students wrote (quoting Patrick Kermit I think), the interpreter is the common language of the staff and the client. And that common language has to be understandable of course.
There are some statements you can make about good interpreting:
1. Interpreting is good when it works for the participants.
2. Interpreting is good when it conveys the meaning of an utterance from speaker to listener (you will have to define “meaning” though :-)).
3. Interpreting is good when it serves its purpose.
But these three statements does not allow my client to put on his or her headphones and immediately say: “That was good interpreting”. It does not enable the patient to judge whether I am interpreting the whole meaning – “everything” or not.
When interpreters take exams there are different ways to try to ensure objectivity in the light of good interpreting. The first thing is to hire a jury, several people judging the same thing gives objectivity, or at least inter-subjectivity. Another idea may be do decide that the interpreters MUST render e.g. 80% of all meaning-bearing units, and then you count…
None of these methods is of course water tight, and does it really ensure good interpreting? In Grenada in Spain there is a group of researchers, ECIS, who has found out that interpreting clients claim that one particular thing is important for quality (let’s say choice of correct word), but when the speeches are tweaked and one issue does not work in the interpreting (e.g.) intonation, then the client scores the interpreting lower and may even argue that the word choice was bad.
You may also have every meaning-bearing unit correct in your interpreting without producing any intelligible utterance.
Another group of researchers concluded that exactness in the interpreting and neutrality were less important features than trust for community interpreters. The clients were most pleased with interpreters they felt they could trust, interpreters who took an active role. Very little was mentioned on exactness of the interpreting.
So, to sum up; the definition of good interpreting is not something that all parties necessary agree on, but good, or the lack thereof, interpreting is something that affects all parties.

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.

Positive experience when interpreting for a friend

I have so far mostly whined about interpreting for friends. But today I had a very positive experience. It started as soon as I introduced myself (of course I mentioned that I earned my living interpreting, not just helping out on this single occasion), the doctor was positively surprised and said that she had never experienced that kind of luxury.

After some 20 minutes of translation, the doctor realized (AND told me!) that she had not fully understood exactly how my friend experienced the different symptoms, and that that was an important piece of information for the diagnosis! What can I say? WHY isn’t it compulsory for all authorities in all European countries to make use of the service of public service interpreters.

Day 04 Daily interpreting practice

What is exercise in interpreting? Can you get better if you practice? Are interpreters born or made? In cognitive psychology there is a concept called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice a common denominator for experts, it means that you not only practice dutifully, but that you actually have a specific goal with your practice. And the goal is not just: “I’m going to be a darn good interpreter”, but: “Today, I will practice to end my sentences”, or: “This time I’m going to make sure I don’t use any ‘euh'” and so forth.
As I have studied and interviewed very experienced interpreters I have realized that interpreting practice is not just something that has to do with the interpreting exercise. It is also things as, reading newspapers in different languages, listening to the news in different languages, getting to know your speakers, for instance.
Interpreters spend much time preparing, and I would argue that the preparation is also part of the deliberate practice (if you do it properly of course). All those different activities develop and increase the interpreter’s knowledge base and this in turn improves the interpreting performance. Any interpreting teacher will tell you that interpreting is not just translating verbatim from one language to another. And once you have mastered the interpreting skill the way to improve your interpreting is to broaden your knowledge base.
So, my exercise today was; reading the newspaper, listening to the news, using my foreign languages, and blog a little bit. Today I did not interpret, but I tried to increase my knowledge base in preparation of next interpreting mission

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.

Day 03 Interpreting teachers I remember

The interesting thing in interpreting training is that all your teachers are professional interpreters. This means that if you make it through interpreting school, your former teachers will be your colleagues. It’s like being trained into a medieval guild. And somehow after a couple of years in the business your former teachers grow into being just colleagues. Basically you stop being afraid of them.

There are horror stories going around about teachers whose only goal seemed to be to make at least one student crying every lesson. I’ve understood as I started teaching interpreting that the difficult thing about it is that (often unintentionally) you criticize personal things like voice, word choice and so forth. Therefore your students may perceive you as harsher than you actually are or want to be.

So much for general comments on interpreting teachers and then to the teachers I remember. Most teachers I had were great. Without my Danish consecutive teacher I would not have passed my exam. She gave me extra classes at her place, just like that. Taking of her own free time for nothing, just to help me pass. I did not have enormous problems with Danish, but consecutive technique took some time to master.

At my interpreting school, staff interpreters came on Friday mornings every week and Saturday mornings once a month to give interpreting classes. On top of that we had interpreting classes with other teachers as well. I don’t remember that my interpreting was ever “cut to pieces” by teachers, but I remember occasions when we laughed real hard at what I produced. The worst comment I have ever got was actually a little later when I had been practicing working into English from my mother tongue. Then a teacher told me he never wanted to hear me utter another word in English ever again. I told you it’s tough from time to time.

But in general, thank you to all my teachers. You were devoted, inspiring, tough and most of all determined teach us interpreting. And you made me an interpreter!

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.

Elusive universal translator

Louise the HK interpreter posted this article. Very thoughtful on universal translator device or machine translation. Great aid, but not a sole saviour.

Day 02 My first interpreting job

I think this is something EVERY interpreter will remember. The first time I opened the microphone live, when the listeners were real clients, not just my teachers or fellow students, was at a conference on the pension system. Extremely technical, very difficult.

I was terrified a week before, when I started preparing. I made word lists long as Rapunzel’s braid, I brought all my dictionaries and all the bits of documentation I could possibly find. Luckily, I worked with very nice and supportive colleagues (fortunately, most colleagues in my booth are), who reassured me and helped me out.

There are many first times though and some of them are just as daunting. First time I interpreted for the European institutions was just as terrifying. Despite of preparations and word lists and even a period of internship with the institutions, I still managed to mix up the different groups, committees and institutions.

My first community interpreting job, was overwhelming. I felt that everything was my responsibility only (compared to a conference where there is at least one colleague present all the time), I did not understand that both the doctor and the patient had their responsibility in the conversation as well. More than once during the discussion I felt insufficient.

Now, you may wonder why I struggled on, despite all these difficult experiences. The truth is that it was more fascinating and rewarding than scaring. I left the booth or the medical office with a sentiment of satisfaction and a feeling that I made a difference.

There are still “first times”, but less scaring nowadays than it was fifteen years ago.

This post is part of a list, 30 days of interpreting. You can see the whole list here.