I really liked this article on words that are like icebergs. When you think about it you can peel off layer after layer, and it’s not even sure one word means the same to you as it does to me, in fact it probably doesn’t. I wrote about Sapir-Whorf here, who claimed that your language affects the way you think (I simplify the reasoning of course), and in some way I DO believe that language (together with cultural heritage of course) affects the way you think. That’s why it may be so extremely difficult to grasp everything that lies beneath the surface, just as with the iceberg.
Category Archives for Interpreting
30 days on interpreting
I have decided to adapt one of those lists that you find on so many blogs to interpreting, and see if I can come up with something new and (hopefully) interesting. 30 days and 30 quite personal things on interpreting.
Day 01 About me
Day 02 My first interpreting job
Day 03 Interpreting teachers I remember
Day 04 Daily interpreting practice
Day 05 What is good interpreting
Day 06 A day at work
Day 07 My best colleague
Day 08 A moment in the booth
Day 09 I really believe that…
Day 10 This is what I bring to the booth
Day 11 My colleagues
Day 12 In my suitcase
Day 13 An interpreting week
Day 14 One thing you didn’t know about interpreting
Day 15 My goals as an interpreter
Day 16 Don’t you ever make mistakes?
Day 17 My best interpreting memory
Day 18 My favourite type of interpreting
Day 19 Something I regret
Day 20 This month
Day 21 The most interesting person I’ve interpreted
Day 22 Things that upset me when I interpret
Day 23 Things that make me happy when I interpret
Day 24 Can you show your feelings when you interpret
Day 25 The first time I heard about interpreting
Day 26 Things I like less with my job
Day 27 My favourite booth
Day 28 If I could improve the interpreting profession I would…
Day 29 My ambitions
Day 30 And lastly…
More on interpreting for friends
I have once again had my fair share of interpreting for friends in different situations. The network of public service interpreters and the habit of using such interpreters is not very well established in Belgium. Of course I’ll interpret when my friends ask me to, but it is a very interesting contrast to my every day interpreting job.
As a public service interpreter in Sweden I am called to, for instance, a clinic when a doctor needs my services in a consultation. Simply the fact that the clinic books me makes me more neutral in the clinic’s eyes, this is strengthened by the fact that I have the same ethnical background as most of the personel.
However, when interpreting for my friends, I arrive to the clinic with my friend/the patient, I have the same ethnical background as the patient. I have, in the eyes of the doctor, the same status as the patient’s husband, or sister or any other accompanying family member. The fact that I loose my official role also affects the interpreting. I wrote in an earlier blogpost that it’s more difficult to use the neutral interpreting “I” when you have a non-professional relationship with your client (e.g. interpreting for a friend), and when the other user of your interpreting service, in this case the doctor, does not perceive you as “a professional interpreter” because of your relationship to the patient; it’s very difficult to keep that neutral distance and professional tone.
Naturally, I should (and I do) struggle to keep my professional voice and I need to point out to the participants that I am a professional and imparital interpreter. However, this is so much easier when there is an existing service for public service interpreters, and when you are booked by the authority not by the patient or your friend.
Insults
Interpreters are regularly confronted with angry people. Most often, luckily, not people who are angry with the interpreter, but clients who argue with each other. People who use swearwords or words that you would never ever want to take in your mouth.
So, how do you deal with it? The sad truth is you have to be faithful to your speaker. If your client is angry, you have no right to tone that down, the counter party or parties have the right to know what was said in order to respond correctly.
Just remember that people of different cultures swear differently. In latin cultures many swear words are related to sex or genitals, whereas nordic cultures have more swear words relating to the devil or hell. And with new generations growing up swear words, just like slang, changes. So it may be good to brush up your swearing terminology from time to time.
This clip from Youtube shows Nicolas Farage, an EU-sceptic (to say the least), British MEP attacking Commission president Herman van Rompuy. The challenge when interpreting this is of course to trust that what you hear is truly what Farage is saying.
Me, myself and I in interpreting
As an interpreter you interpret in the first person. Anyone even remotely acquainted to interpreting will tell you that. It’s one of the first articles in any interpreting guidelines. The reason for using the first person when you interpret is that you are the voice of the person you interpret for. If you use the third person instead, for instance: “He says that he does not remember that day”, you take away the voice of that person and by taking away the voice you also take away some of his or her credibility.
Now, this is something I have never had any problems with. No problem to interpret in the first person, and I have interpreted in many different context both very formal (such as ministerial meetings) and very informal (such as house call with a midwife). The first person singular was never a problem, until I started interpreting for my friends. I live in a French speaking area and have friends who do not speak French, so from time to time I interpret for my friends, at the doctors, at the garage and so forth. And for the first time in my career it’s hard to use the first person. Instinctively, it seems, I use “my friend needs to…”, “Madame says that…”. As soon as I realize what I’m doing I stop of course, but then, unconsciously, I slip back to third person again.
I have no idea why this happen, I would guess that for the first time I interpret for people I know very well, and because of that it feels strange to be their voice. It does not bother me with complete strangers, but apparently it bothers me with people I know.
History of interpreting
Interpreting is ancient. Maybe as ancient as languages or mankind. Interestingly enough there are references to interpreters in many different historical sources. Like the representation of an interpreter in General Horemhebs grave, Unprofessional translation has an interesting post on ancient Egypt and interpreters there.
Cicero in ancient Rome spoke highly of his interpreter and the services the interpreter did for him. In the Ottoman empire interpreters were called dragoman and their role was not just interpreting but also acting as guides, go-betweens and door-openers to the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman empire also had sworn court interpreters, as can be seen from old court records from the Ottoman empire. Update December 6, 2010: Another interesting post on dragomans and the history of interpreting by Unprofessional Translations
There were also sworn court interpreters in Spain in the 16th Century. And interpreters were also used by the conquistadors to communicate with the indigenous people in the Americas. Although the training those interpreters received were perhaps not to be envied. Natives were brought back to Spain where they worked as slaves and learnt the language. If they were judged good enough they were brought back to their origins to act as interpreters.
But interpreting hit the headlines with the Nüremberg Trials. Although interpreting was used at the international organisations before the Second World War, this was the first time that large scale simultaneous interpreting was used. Technology now allowed interpreters to listen to the original in head phones and interpret into a microphone that broadcasted the interpreting to listeners. Hardly any of the interpreters who interpreted at the Nüremberg Trials had any interpreting training. But most of the interpreters there then went on to a career in interpreting. These interpreters were the founding fathers and mothers of the profession. They were active in the professionalization of interpreters, they helped training new interpreters and they lay the foundations of aiic, the international association for conference interpreters.
Community interpreters are a different case. Community interpreting has not started its professionalization until the past 10 or 15 years. Community interpreters were typically friends and and family of the person needing community interpreting. However, thanks to researchers and very active community interpreters, and in particular thanks to the Critical link conference, community interpreting is slowly gaining professional standards in the same way as its big sister conference interpreting.
Professional responsibility, Camayd-Freixas
We’ve just discussed Eric Camayd-Freixas in class and his brave act after the Postville raid. You can go back to what I wrote in 2008 about Interpreter’s responsibility here. Back then, it was a hot topic among interpreters. There are also several clips on You Tube featuring interviews with Professor Camayd. I find this one very interesting, and this is the second part of it.
The interpreter’s role in the participation framework
Erving Goffman was an anthropologist and sociologist who studied social interaction. Among other things, he proposed a model to analyse the distribution of responsibility between interlocutors. Cecilia Wadensjö (1998) uses this model to analyse the role of the interpreter in an interpreter mediated event. An interlocutor has a given role in a communicative context. The roles can be symmetric or assymmetric depending on the situation. Participants can either be assigned different roles depending on the context or they can take up different roles. The participation framework (Goffman, 1981) gives different participants different status. Anyone who hears an utterance can take on a participant status, but depending on the situation you can have different production formats. The formats can be those of the animator (the person who conveys either his or her own words or of somebody else’s) or the author (somebody who compiles fact or information and makes an utterance but without necessarily being the one who guarantees the correctness of the information in that utterance) and finally the principal (the actor who is fully responsible for an utterance [the fact, the information behind and so forth], you can be the principal both of an utterance regarding your own feelings or something very formal such as the application of a particular law). In order to fully understand the interpreter’s role in the communication Wadensjö adds three reception formats: the reporter (who just reports verbatim what has been said), the recapitulator (who recapitulates what has been said but in an active listening and understanding act, not just verbatim repeating) and the respondent (who listens in order to respond, to take the communication further). The interpreter’s role in the communicative context vary, but has to be seen in the light of the reception formats. The interpreter is an animator and sometimes a principal, but the interpreter is first and foremost a recapitulator (hopefully, since we all agree by know that a word-for-word translation is rarely successful) who sometimes step into the role of responder. The interpreter responds and becomes the principal in utterances such as ”Could you please repeat that” or ”The interpreter would like to ask a question”, i.e. situations when the interpreter goes out of his/her role of conveying somebody else’s message and goes into the role of transmitting a message of his or her own.
Turn taking and interpreting
Turn taking in discourse governs who has the right to talk, when you are allowed to talk and who decides whose turn it is. A turn in a discourse is the period when one speaker has the exclusive right to talk. It is based on a common norm system, but the norm can of course differ from group to group or culture to culture. The turn can be taken by one speaker or can be given by the speaker to another listener. There are different ways to indicate a turn, you can do it linguistically (questions such as “What do you say?” or “You see?” and so forth, but also other cues) or para-linguistically (pause, glance, hem and so forth).
Turn taking can be more or less difficult for participants in a communicative event depending on whether you share the same norms or not. However, when we add an interpreter we add one more participant, but who are not participant on the same grounds as the other two. Particularly in dialogue interpreting, the interpreter has implications for the turn taking. The other participants in the dialogue cannot freely regulate the turn. However, the interpreter can use paralinguistic turn taking signals to take the turn (to interpret) or to give the turn (signal that it’s time for a new turn from one of the other participants). Cecilia Wadensjö has studied this and how interpreters manage this. In this paper for instance.
Language and thought, Sapir-Whorf and Everett (again)
There an interesting article in New York Times right know. It asks the question if language affects the way you think. The author, Guy Deuthscher, takes his starting point in theSapir Whorf hypothesis (or rather the Whorf, since this is one of the early articles by Whorf he’s referring to). Deutscher claims that time and common sense has proved the concept wrong. He quotes Roman Jakobson who pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages. Jakobson claimed that:
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.
And on this quote Deutscher reflects further on whether you languages shapes you brain or not. And to me he seems convinced that this is not the case. You CAN describe anything in another language, even if the other language lacks that terminology, Deutscher says. And in most cases this is true of course.
But I’m curious that he not once, discusses the findings of Dan Everett, the linguist who mapped Pirahã, a language in the Amazonian jungle. Everett says that since he got to know Pirahã he has started to doubt that languages do not shape the way you think. Since the Pirahã language is so fundamentally different from other languages and certain concepts are very difficult to explain to a Pirahã. One feature is that Pirahã do not tag past as other languages do and things in the past is therefore very hard to grasp. If you don’t know for instance a historical person or know somebody who knows that person, then there is no proof that that person actually existed for a Pirahã and therefore no reason to believe such a person ever existed.
So maybe Sapir and Whorf weren’t entirely wrong after all, or…
Interpretings 