Translation vs. Interpretation

As I’ve mentioned before, many people seem confused about the difference between translation and interpretation. So any articles that can help illuminate this for folks (especially clients) are welcome. Check this piece out.

Sign Language and Music

The sign language interpreter for Melodifestivalen (the Swedish run-up to Eurovision), Tommy Krångh, has rightfully made the news recently. His interpretations of pop songs in the contest are fantastic; they’re moving and theatrical. I’m so glad we all can have a chance to see them and learn from them, and I’m also glad that they are bringing new awareness to sign language interpretation. Check out some of his work here and read about him in this article.

The Lost

There are many reasons why I’d recommend Daniel Mendelsohn’s wonderful book The Lost, but for now I’ll just mention Mendelsohn’s exploration of translation. He is a translator, so perhaps it makes sense that he has a particular interest in translation, but it also feeds into his story.

First of all, during some of his trips, he has an interpreter/guide with him. Few books actually acknowledge the use of interpreters, so I appreciated that he did. Many authors simply act as though they were able to communicate with local populations through their own abilities, never acknowledging that there was a layer of interpretation between them.

Also, and more importantly for the story, Mendelsohn talks about different editions of Jewish books, and the way the translators interpret the works differently, thus making the readers see them from varying perspectives. Mendelsohn’s analyses of religious passages and their interpretations are fascinating counterpoints to his travels and his explorations of his family history. For example, he discusses the story of Cain and Abel and how Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Ittzhak) and (Rabbi Richard Elliot) Friedman translate the story, and how they analyse the story and their own translations. Sometimes Mendelsohn even says which version he prefers and why. The biblical tales he chooses always fit with the themes of whatever he is thinking about or going through at the moment, and this has the effect of highlighting just how essential translation is.

I found it hard to put The Lost down, and I definitely recommend it, both for the translatorial aspects and as a generally fascinating read.

Another Round-Up of Articles

Here’s another round-up of interesting, relevant articles!

I don’t often post on interpreting, so here’s an interview with someone who works as an interpreter.

Here’s an article from my alma mater, Bryn Mawr. It’s about a BA-level class that does good and it involves translation. It sounds fantastic!

Next up is a piece about publishing literary translations.

This article about what you look for in a translation. Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article! 

What are some words or expressions you might want to be using? Check out some here.

This BBC article looks at all the writers in Iceland.

Finally, a depressing tale of how a translator was treated. Read about it here or here or here.

What it Takes to Be an American Sign Language Interpreter: Guest Post

What it Takes to Be an American Sign Language Interpreter: Guest Post

This post was brought to you by Affordable Language Services, the nation’s most experienced translation, transcription and interpreting service provider of over 150 languages, including American Sign Language.

If you’re interested in becoming a certified American Sign Language interpreter, there is good news. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the need for interpreters is on the rise at a rate that’s faster than the average career. Certified sign language interpreters convert information from a spoken language into sign language. Alternatively, they may interpret what an individual is signing into a spoken language.  The greatest demand for this profession exists primarily within medium and large cities, but small and rural communities also benefit from the services an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter provides.

Career Background

ASL incorporates the use of one’s hands, arms, head, body language and facial expressions to communicate without the use of sound. The language is used throughout North America and is completely different from British Sign Language. In fact, ASL evolved from French Standardized Sign Language (SSL) because this is where the language has its origins. The Italians and French began to standardize sign language as early as the 1700s.

In the 18th century, the birth rate of deaf people on Martha’s Vineyard was abnormally high and ranged from one in every 25 births to one in 155 births. This “founder effect” led to the creation of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language. Public sign language interpreting later began to grow with the help of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an individual who wanted all churchgoers to receive the messages preached. Gallaudet traveled to France to learn more about SSL and convinced one of his teachers to come back to the United States to help teach at the American School for the Deaf, where ASL was born. It wasn’t until 1955 that ASL became a recognized independent language.

Sign language interpreting has grown from communicating at home, church and school to providing educational, vocational, medical, social and other essential services to those in deaf communities. There is no limit to the application of ASL.

How to Learn American Sign Language

There are a variety of ways to learn ASL, including:

• Online resources
• Videos
• Classes at community centers
• Classes taught at schools that serve deaf communities
• Learning from friends or family members who know ASL
• College classes
• Books

When you learn ASL, it’s important to remember that classes or programs may be designed specifically for children, teens or adults. A great way to enhance your ASL skills is to practice with those who actively use it to communicate.

How to Become a Certified American Sign Language Interpreter

Simply knowing how to sign doesn’t qualify you to be a sign language interpreter, but it goes a long way toward earning a certification. After you graduate from high school, the following path will help you become a certified interpreter:

1. Earn a bachelor’s degree. While a degree in any field is acceptable in order to obtain a professional certification, it’s a good idea to consider a degree in ASL interpreting. 

2. Complete an ASL interpreter training program. The Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf provides a list of programs. Such programs will help advance your ASL skills as well as the skills needed to be an effective interpreter, such as understanding inflections, simultaneous speakers, cultural differences, slang and more. You’ll also learn how to advance your own cognitive and technical skills.

3. Obtain a National Interpreter Certification (NIC). The essential certification to seek is the one provided jointly by the National Association of the Deaf and the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. In order to earn this certification, you must pass a test that consists of performance, written and interview components. Advanced and master certifications are also available.

Note: Your respective state may require you to also obtain a state-issued certification in addition to a National Interpreter Certification if you wish to work as an interpreter.

American Sign Language interpreters make communication possible. There are a variety of situations in which ASL interpreting is necessary, and you can help become an invaluable asset in bridging communication gaps.

Getting a PhD in Translation Studies

I am nearing the end of my time in a doctoral program in translation studies, so I thought I would write a little bit about what it means to get a PhD in the field. A shorter version of this was published as a guest post earlier this month.

In September 2006, I moved from Sweden to Wales in order to study at Swansea University. There are not that many schools yet that offer translation studies; more often, one must study a language or comparative literature. So what does it mean to be in a translation studies program?

Translation programs on the BA or MA level generally focus on training translators. Such programs combine theoretical and practical work. Students improve their language skills, read and discuss translation theory, practice translation, learn about computer programs and terminology, and maybe get information about starting a company or working for agencies, and other such things. In other words, these kinds of programs are aimed at students who are good with languages and want to work in the field of translation.

In a sense, translation studies might as well be totally unrelated. I have met many people who study or work in the field of translation studies and yet have never translated and have no intention of doing so (I tend to find this odd, but that is a different issue). In a PhD program, a student is being prepared to become a researcher, not a translator. As in BA or MA programs, students learn about translation theory, but by the PhD level, they are expected to have (or to quickly obtain) in-depth knowledge about this. Students should already have extensive language skills. One doesn’t really attend courses, although this depends on what country the program is and what individual students require. For example, I chose to sit in on several classes about translation theory and the history of translation, mainly out of interest and a desire to refresh or extend my knowledge. Basically, one spends most of the time researching.

Research what? Well, there are many different possible areas. One can research and analyze the translation of specific kinds of non-fiction or fiction works or specific types of language, the translation of a particular author, what it means to translate between two or more different languages, how translators feel about their jobs, what translators actually do as they work, how translators are or ought to be trained, how translators use (or don’t use) computer tools, how ideas of translation have changed over time, critiquing translation, how translation can be used to control certain populations, how translation can develop a target language, what conditions translators work in, differences in how translators and those studying to be translators work or think about their work, and much, much more. Remember that much of this can apply to interpreting too, which is generally subsumed under the field of translation studies, though interpreting studies as a separate field is growing, and also to subtitling.

As an example, my own research has been focused on children’s literature and I have been particularly interested in how figurative language is used and translated in books for children from English to Swedish. I also know people who research the translation of medical texts between English and Chinese, and the translation of idiomatic phrases in non-fiction from Spanish to English, and the subtitling of talk shows. Some researchers use computer programs to help with their research (particularly if they need a large corpus of texts), while others interview translators or sit with them while they work, and still others focus on close analysis of texts.

Those who are starting out in the field often spend a lot of time learning about translation theory in general and their particular field specifically. For example, in my first term or two in the PhD program, I read everything I could find on the translation of children’s literature, on translation in the colonial and postcolonial contexts (this was related to my need to learn more about translation and power), on functionalist theories and skopos, on translating dialects and wordplay, and related topics. Others might want to read about gender theories or issues of in/visibility or financial translation or interpreting in a legal setting or think-aloud protocols.

The next step is picking one’s texts and starting the research and, of course, trying to find something new and important to contribute to the field. I use primarily textual analysis and statistical analysis, which means I study texts and their translations, and then compute how common certain translatorial strategies are. In the first term, students often begin writing literature reviews and chapters of their dissertation. Here, one’s supervisors should give detailed criticism on one’s writing style and ideas.

In the first year, many students start attending academic conferences and sometimes even presenting at them. Conferences are an excellent way to learn about what research is taking place in the field and also to get feedback on one’s budding research. Next, one ought to try to get articles published. Attending and speaking at conferences and having work published are both essential when one is finished and looking for a job. Research trips may also prove beneficial; I spent two wonderful weeks at the National Library in Stockholm, studying various translations of work by Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain.

Students must be independent and good at working hard and making their own schedule. Many people don’t understand that being a PhD student is very different from studying at the BA or MA level. No one will give you deadlines or tell you what to do (generally, that is; some supervisors might be a bit more hands-on). You have to recognize that everything is up to you and that you have to prepared to be very active.

I have really loved my time being a PhD student in translation studies. I have continued to translate, edit, write, and teach throughout my years in Wales, and that has been really stimulating for me, although many PhD students prefer to focus solely on their research. It’s a lot of fun to research translation and to try to contribute to the field and in the future, I hope to continue combining research with being a practicing translator.

Favorite Translation/Language Blogs

I've long kept a list of blogs on this site, but I thought I'd call your attention to it now, as the days are getting darker and people just want to stay inside with a warm drink and some good reading material. This is not a complete list, of course, just a few of my favorite, frequently updated blogs on translation and language.

Three Percent

Beyond Words

Language Log

David Crystal's Blog

Language Hat

Omniglot

From Our Lips

Web Translations

Life In Translation

Translating is an Art

Masked Translator

About Translation

Separated by a Common Language

Ur språkens tunnlar (in Swedish)

A Round-Up of Articles

Once again I’ve noticed quite a few articles of interest of late.

Here is a piece on translation software from the Wall Street Journal.

This interview with Pierre Bayard from the New York Times discusses reading.

An article from The Hindu looks at an anthology of short fiction from South India and discusses translation in India.

This BBC article on interpreting is from a few years ago, but is nevertheless worth reading.

An interview with lexicographer Erin McKean provides insight into a career working with dictionaries.

Translation in Novels

Over the weekend, I read Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. I can’t say I felt too drawn to her writing, but I’m not going to write a review of it here anyway. What is interesting is that the first section of the book I chose happened to mention translation (well, actually, interpretation), and I had some definite issues with how our field was portrayed.

The main character, Kate Brown, is good with languages and her husband agrees on her behalf for her to fill in as a conference interpreter for a few weeks one summer. First of all, though she interprets at meetings, her job is always described as “translator”. Readers of this blog, of course, know the difference between a translator and an interpreter.

Also, Kate Brown is very well-paid; she earns enough from what probably amounts to no more than two months of work to be able to buy designer clothes, go to a fancy hairstylist, travel in Turkey and Spain, stay at an expensive hotel in London, and then still have enough to live on in a rented room in London for more than a month. Are any of you interpreters doing that well?

Finally, after working as an interpreter (not a translator!) for only a short while, Kate Brown’s boss tells her that she is wasting her talents as an interpreter and should instead work as an…(wait for it!)…administrator! That’s right, since you don’t need any talents or skills to be an interpreter (or translator), even though you are apparently very highly paid (to be fair, Mrs. Brown does earn more money as an administrator, but she still got a good salary as an interpreter). Maybe I’m not a good translator, since no one has suggested I go into administration instead!

Besides getting annoyed at all this, Lessing’s novel also made me wonder about how translators (or interpreters) are described in other novels. You’d like to believe that novelists would do research before writing about a field they don’t know much about, but did Lessing? Do you know other novels or short stories that feature translators or interpreters? If so, how are they portrayed?

Sight Translation

The previous post described a translator training program I learned about during a lecture at Swansea University. There was also another interesting lecture at my school last week. Professor Gloria Sampaio from the Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil spoke about sight translation.

Sight translation is something I had never thought much about and it is not one of the more researched areas of translation studies, so I appreciated her talk. Basically, sight translation is doing a translation on the spot orally from a written text. Sometimes a translator or interpreter might have a couple of minutes to prepare, but often she or he simply gets a text and has to read and translate it aloud at once. In other words, it is oral translation, a combination of translation and interpretation, of the visual and the vocal. Professor Sampaio said that it should sound as though the translator is just reading aloud something in the target language.

Historically, she explained, it was used a pedagogical tool for teaching classic languages. Some language courses still do use this technique. Now, it can frequently be part of an interpretation assignment, such as during a court case when there are documents being discussed, or if an interpreter is doing a simultaneous conference interpretation and someone is reading aloud from an essay (so the interpreter has the paper and also has to listen in case the speaker deviates from the text in some way). In other situations, an interpreter or translator might be handed a text and asked to summarize or analyze it, rather than perform a straight translation.

Professor Sampaio made it clear that sight translation is a challenging activity, since it requires so many different skills at once (reading comprehension, analysis, terminology, quick-thinking, memory, speech production, and so on), and that it could be a useful part of interpreter training programs. She also thought it was a good way of testing and assessing translation/interpretation/language students or applicants for language-related jobs.

How Journalists Work With Interpreters When Reporting

Journalists reporting from foreign countries often have to rely on translators or interpreters when they want to use documents or interview people in the language spoken in the country in question. Many papers (in English and in Swedish, at least – I am not familiar with the newspapers in other languages) just quote from sources as though they spoke in the language of the newspaper; in other words, they don’t name the interpreter or even mention the fact that one was used. For greater transparency, this perhaps ought to be done.

In the New York Times, the Public Editor recently posted to his blog about this topic, and invited staff editor Andrea Kannapell to comment. She wrote, “When there is the luxury of time, and The Times considers the investment worthwhile, we send correspondents for a year of language training before they take up a foreign assignment. We have begun such training for one correspondent who has already spent a good deal of time in Iraq. A year of training, of course, will not make anyone truly fluent, but it does enable the correspondent to get a sense of what people are saying — as well as a sense of whether a translator is up to the job.”

However, that is not always the case, and journalists may still need to rely on interpreters (note: not translators – the people at the Times seem a little confused about the difference between a translator and an interpreter), so one technique they have is to “ask questions more than once, or ask in a slightly different way, if they feel the translator has skipped something or offered a garbled passage.” A comment from translator Daniel Garcia Pallaviccini after this post brings up the issue of what an interpreter is to think if the journalist behaves a little strangely and keeps asking the same questions; the point here is that the journalist ought to attempt to have as good a relationship as possible with the interpreter and perhaps should discuss his or her concerns or methods of working with this person. In the post, Sabrina Tavernise, a correspondent in Iraq, is quoted on her relationship with her interpreter, whom she says has never “purposefully mistranslat[ed].” Of course, clients working with interpreters or translators must always be cautious and aware, but some of these comments do sound a little overly suspicious, as though most interpreters would mistranslate on purpose.

In political situations, finding and using a reliable interpreter is naturally very important, but it is also quite tricky, and it was interesting to read about how one newspaper views the process. I still think that giving information about the interpreter (or translator, in the case of documents) and the methods employed would increase the trustworthiness for editors and readers.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this link!

On Translation vs. Interpretation by Guest Blogger Sarah Alys Lindholm

Brave New Words is happy to welcome Sarah Alys Lindholm as our second guest blogger. (Penny Milbouer, a German to English translator, was our first guest blogger.)

Sarah Alys Lindholm is a Japanese to English translator located in Houston, TX. Since graduating from Bryn Mawr College as a linguistics major in 2003, she has been translating anime (Japanese animated TV shows and movies) for a living. Now she’s pairing that vocation with a job as Media Coordinator, coordinating releases and proofing DVDs for the Houston-based company ADV Films.

In this post, Ms. Lindholm discusses the differences between translation and interpretation, and it is a very timely and relevant issue, as interpretation has come up on the blog several times recently.

On Translation vs. Interpretation by Sarah Alys Lindholm:

Many people don’t realize there’s a difference between “translation” and “interpretation.” Even people who work with translators all the time will sometimes ask us “Can you translate at a meeting I’m holding?” And I’m sure interpreters frequently get handed documents and asked to translate them. Perhaps it’s easier to go from interpretation to translation; I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t like to assume. However, as a professional translator I can definitely say that interpretation is so unlike translation as to be an entirely different proposition and much more difficult for me.

So what is the difference between “translation” and “interpretation”? “Translation” refers to the translation from one language to another of something which is frozen in time: a book, a TV show, a letter, a play, a speech someone has already delivered which is recorded and then given to the translator in its entirety. “Interpretation” is a real-time exercise – when you interpret, conversation, speech, etc. is actually taking place, and as it happens you are taking what is said in Language A and communicating it in Language B. It may be that you are interpreting at the same time as others are speaking, or it may be that you wait until the end of a chunk of speech and then interpret it into another language while the speaker pauses to wait for you.

Although many people seem to regard “translation” and “interpretation” as the same or at least activities that the same person would do, and although there are people who do both translate and interpret, the two are radically different both experientially and practically.

Just recently I had my first interpretation gig. I had the honor of interpreting at two Question & Answer panels and two autograph sessions for Mr. Yoshitaka Amano at Oni-con 2006 in Houston, Texas. I think a large part of the reason why I was approached about the job (about 48 hours before the convention began) was that assumption so many people have that translators interpret and vice versa. However, I took the job and am glad I did so; it was fascinating. Here are a few of the things I learned or confirmed my suspicious about:

Translation is you in a room; interpretation is you in the world.
Most translation takes place alone at a desk. The translator interacts with something which is fixed in time, complete, a separate unit. The translator only talks to people as a side activity. The translator is free to wander the chambers of her mind, to ruminate and to solve problems in consultation with and according to the dictates of her own body and soul. There is silence in which to think; there is the freedom to, if she suddenly finds herself needing to know an obscure fact about whale migration, make a long-distance call to Dad and ask him about the migratory patterns of whales. Interpretation, on the other hand, generally takes place in a group of people, because what you are interpreting is generally the speech of or between people. You must interact with people. You are not free to intensely probe your own soul until you find the answer to a sticky problem, no matter how much introspection it may take. You are not free to take a bathroom break in the middle of the climactic point in the dialogue. You are not free to stop and call Dad to have him clarify a technical point.

The advantages and disadvantages there are obvious. However, there is another side to this interaction with the world in interpretation. In translation, it is often not possible to ask the original creator what s/he intended. If something is open to multiple interpretations, leaving you in a jam about which to opt for, there is usually no recourse. There is often no opportunity for dialogue between the translator and the original writer/speaker. It’s an inorganic process, in a way. Interpretation, however, is an organic process. There is often (though not always) an open avenue of dialogue between you and the person you are interpreting. Often you can ask a question, clarify a point, ask for a rephrase, or confirm that your understanding is correct. It’s possible to look much worse in interpretation – to crash and burn – because the result is real-world and not inorganically polished before publication. But it is also possible to fly much higher, in some ways.

Translation is out of time; interpretation is in time.
Because interpretation is in the world, it occurs in real time. The translator must make her deadline, but she does not have to translate in real time, or even in real order. She can take breaks; she can work slowly on a section of text if it is dense or difficult; she can even translate the end before the beginning if she wishes. The translation will be delivered as a whole product, and no one will ever know or care how it was done. In interpretation, there is no “whole product,” and there is immense time pressure. You cannot skip to the end of the conversation and do that first, because the end has not happened yet. You cannot go think for an hour. You do not have the time to lovingly craft and polish each line like a fine precious stone. Interpretation is down and dirty. You are not blowing glass. You are in the sandbox.

This is one of the key differences between someone who identifies as a “translator” and someone who identifies as an “interpreter,” I believe. The translator works in nuance, sometimes spending days revisiting and fine-tuning a single sentence or even a single word. The interpreter pays attention to nuance but deals in the meat of the issue. Often there must be instant turnaround of the type a translator is not used to providing and may be quite bad at (“Usually I would go back to my desk, think about this, and email you!”). The interpreter must grasp the meat of the issue right away and deal with that first. When you deal in real time this way, sometimes tiny pieces are lost. This would eat away at my soul and mind as a translator but is something I have to resign myself to in interpretation or I will go crazy. Likewise, I have had occasion to supervise the translation work of someone who primarily identifies as an interpreter, and found that his translations did not capture nuances that a translation (as opposed to real-time interpretation) is able to capture and should capture. (I should note that I do not believe he is necessarily representative of interpreters as a whole; I think it spoke more to his individual, personal attitude being the type of attitude which did not go well with translation.)

The interpreter, too, must have a much larger vocabulary than is strictly necessary in a translator. The translator is free to look up any and every word she doesn’t know or doesn’t feel 100% comfortable with and that’s fine, but the interpreter must not be constantly looking up things in a dictionary. Perhaps the translator can in this way extract things which are more precise, but the interpreter will have more core knowledge.

I found while interpreting for Mr. Amano that this time pressure was both a curse and an unexpected spur to creativity. The time pressure made it more difficult to bend my intellect to the issues in a disciplined, thorough way – but the terror and necessity of it caused the kind of sudden solutions, the organic creativity, that can only happen in a situation with time pressure. Under the gun you come up with ideas that otherwise might never occur to you.

For translation you have to be able to write; for interpretation you have to be able to talk.
There are a couple of ways in which this is true. An excellent translator must be excellent at writing; depending on the type of translator, proficiency may be required in many types of writing: technical, literary, expository, and/or dialogue writing. But a translator is seldom required to be a good public speaker. On the flip side, an interpreter may not need those writing skills, but an interpreter must have the ability to speak to people, and to speak to crowds. Obviously not every interpretation gig will involve crowds, but it will come up (it certainly came up in my gig – not only did I have to speak in front of a crowd, but I had to speak in front of a crowd of fervent Amano fans!). Interpreting for Mr. Amano was much different than translation, because my output was spoken words from my own mouth, rather than text that someone would later read. This allowed me to say things in a way that I would not translate because it wouldn’t be appropriate to written form, but writing also has advantages over speech in some ways, so the mental approach has to be different depending on what your output is.

It’s also true that interpretation may often involve speaking in multiple languages – in other words, within one conversation a Japanese-English interpreter may have to switch between interpreting Japanese-to-English to Person A and English-to-Japanese to Person B. Suddenly not only must the interpreter be comfortable speaking, but she must be comfortable speaking in both languages. Some translators also go in both directions, but not always. I have occasion to write business emails in Japanese sometimes, but for practical purposes I’m strictly a Japanese-to-English translator at this point in my life, and don’t usually go the other way around. Interpreters generally don’t get to specialize in that way. Since I’m a translator and seldom get the opportunity to really hold long conversations in Japanese and although I speak Japanese, I feel much less comfortable holding sustained time-pressured conversations in it in front of strangers than I would feel doing the same thing in my native language of English. I don’t have to constantly speak smooth Japanese to translate well. But interpretation is different.

In the case of Mr. Amano’s Q&A panels, I was very fortunate to be paired up with a coworker who is a native speaker of Japanese. He, like me, is a translator by profession. But he had done some interpreting before and suggested that we handle things this way: when an audience member asked a question in English, he would interpret that question for Mr. Amano in Japanese. Then when Mr. Amano answered the question in Japanese, I would interpret it for the audience in English. This turned out to be a fabulous way to do things because each of us got to do the brunt of our speaking in our native language, making things faster, more comfortable for the listeners in both languages, smoother in general, and much easier and more comfortable for the two of us. (Plus, because there were two of us, we could help each other out with our respective tasks when necessary.)

Translation and interpretation subject you to different kinds of strain. The physical and mental endurance/exhaustion factors are a bit different across the two activities. I had a horrible time in my second Q&A panel because for the last forty-five minutes of it, I had to go to the bathroom. A translator isn’t subjected to this stress unless she’s in the thick of some brilliant idea she doesn’t want to lose – if my concentration suffers because of physical needs as I translate (and those physical needs can be very different from those encountered in interpretation), I can usually get up, take care of them, and come back. Not so with interpretation. Physical conditions in interpretation have to be endured until the opportunity arises to cope with them, and when you’re unprepared for how to deal with them they can cause added stress that makes it difficult to think calmly and rationally.

In the area of mental strain, which is highly individualistic and so will probably be different for other people, I found differences as well. There is a lot of mental fatigue in translation, because you’re performing the same highly-mentally-tasking activity for hours at a time. For me this is fatigue is a slow drain, like walking around all day. But when I’m interpreting, it’s a large fast drain, like sprinting. There’s more on-your-feet thinking. Your memory gets more of a workout: you have to stretch yourself to remember all the linguistic stuff, yes, but also to remember all the research you’ve done on the relevant people/topics, and more importantly everything that’s been said and is being said. Statements can be long and sometimes meander many places before there’s a break for you to begin repeating them in the other language. Holding all that stuff in your head until you can regurgitate it while at the same time figuring out how to regurgitate it in the target language stretches memory and intellect both at once. One of those two things may give. After the first panel with Mr. Amano I quickly learned to bring more paper and take more notes, jotting down key words as soon as the sentence began to jog my memory in case the sentence’s end was a long way off.

But translation and interpretation are BOTH about research.
Yep. I’ve said many times that translation is all about research, and I think interpretation is the same way. Before I went to meet and interpret for Mr. Amano, I visited his website, printed out Japanese Wikipedia’s entire article about him, and went through and listed the names of the main characters in all the Final Fantasy games in both English and Japanese. All of it was useful. Familiarizing yourself with the person and the relevant topics to the extent possible is key. Since this was a last-minute gig I didn’t get a chance to do much more than Wikipedia, but every little bit helps. In particular, I remember Mr. Amano talked about a work of his called “New York Salad” which I never would have understood or been able to cope with if I hadn’t already known the work existed. Plus, both the client and his agent were immediately set at ease when we met because I had done this basic research, and that’s important as well. Apparently Mr. Amano once got stuck with an interpreter who didn’t know anything about his work, didn’t know who Picasso was, and had never heard of Final Fantasy!

“Interpreting” Seven Languages At Once

Well, I wasn’t going to mention it, but since it’s a hot topic on translation lists, here is a link to Catherine Tate's recent comedy sketch about an interpreter. Yes, it’s supposed to be humorous, but I have to point out that the sketch refers to a translator but is actually about an interpreter, that there is probably no interpreter who can work with so many different languages simultaneously, and that an interpreter needs much more than just a certificate (especially a TOEFL certificate!) in order to be successful at his or her job. And I won’t even mention the characterizations of the different nationalities and languages!

For more on interpretation and translation, see the next post, which will be by a guest blogger.

Speaking of Cheapness…

I don’t usually write about interpretation, but this article relates to my last post, about publishers not being willing to spend the money for quality work.

For those who can’t read Swedish, I can summarize the article as follows: Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi gave a speech at the Göteborg book fair last month. She speaks Farsi, so an interpreter was needed to translate her words to Swedish. Time and money were not spent on finding a proper interpreter for her, so someone who speaks Dari and Pashto was hired instead. This interpreter could not manage the Farsi, and apparently made something of a mess of the speech. She was finally replaced by another interpreter. However, this one was Norwegian. So the people in the audience then had to try to understand the Norwegian, when they ought to have had a good Farsi-Swedish interpreter from the beginning.

Clearly, this kind of thing should not happen at all, but the fact that it happened to a Nobel Prize laureate at a major literary event speaks volumes, to use an apt phrase, about how people don’t recognize the importance of interpretation and translation and aren’t educated enough about what is required in order to do the job well. The book fair organizers probably waited until the last minute to even think about finding an interpreter and then didn’t realize that there are a variety of Middle Eastern languages and that an interpreter of Dari may be able to understand Farsi competently but is not qualified enough to interpret between it and Swedish.

So we translators and interpreters need to find more ways of educating our customers. Any ideas?