Neutrality?

En aparté : AJATT went over the board lately an sucks. Only read past posts.

Books on community interpreting are full of the neutrality warning. You are just but a linguistic, meaning, cultural agent. Only, it doesn't work went I vaguely think I should tell the client I am nothing but your Japanese mouth when I bring you to the police headquarter meet your son, juvenile, who dreamed about Japan while being in Japan and foolishly ended up behind the bar. The father wants to rely on someone's shoulder - BGM : That's what friends are for - asks me if I am available for lunch, wants to be reassured (the lawyer was cold), wants a shot in the arm of vitamin, a gentle slap on the back - BGM : We'll meet again. What machine are you that would slap him back in the face "Sorry dude, i am only but your voice in Japan. Otherwise, I am mute and neutral like a piece of soap". Who would dare behave like that?

Oralization

Another bit of precious information about what they do in interpreting schools. "Oralization" is reading/rendering in spoken, simpler language the content of a written, formal piece of text. The word is featured in the book I referred to in the previous note. I found a reference to oralization in a very good course description at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Your guide to consecutive interpreting

Kudos to the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies for the release of よくわかる　逐次通訳.
This is a collaboration between that university and the Paris ESIT school. It goes down to much details on note taking as never before. The DVD that comes with the book is enough to justify the purchase, with two trainers performing real time note taking and later giving away a postmortem analysis on the why and how they did it. Unless you attend interpretation school, chances are you never had the opportunity to see and listen to such precious commentaries. I never had the opportunity, so far.

Interpreting 140 signs at a time

I am re-reading Nicholas Carr article published in the June issue of The Atlantic : "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".
I am reading it the way Carr worries about what reading has been shifting to these days, in chunks, not in linear fashion, while skipping, which means by the way ever going back. What will be speakers, speeches, discourses, verbal expressions to be interpreted in 30 years time? What will be interpreter's training models in that perspective?

Listening to the cousins

We were lazily walking a path in the countryside of Tokyo. I listened to my son's cousins walking behind, chatting with each other. It sounded like bursts, salvo of words mixed with giggling sounds. I may have understood more if listening intently, the interpreter's mode of listening, but there was no need for that. I noticed though that in casual mood, I hardly could understand what teenagers were chatting about, and that was good enough. No client ever speaks like a teenager.

The art of getting ready

This sounds redundant and it is aimed at it. Finally, by the end of the day, in such circumstances where the market I know wants you to perform in any situation, even in the thickest, uninformed, unprepared ones, the single competence to nurture, to ponder, to fine tune, to record, to split the hairs of, to massage deep in the skin, to raise to an art, apparently as it must dealt with as a set of technics, strategies, the single edge to build and maintain is nothing but the art of getting ready. "Sonny, you speak the language don't you?" They slyly or worse, genuinely you can deliver at the snap of the finger about LED backlight units, knowing you have had some for breakfast. Don't you? I am reminded of the LinkedIn crowd translation scandal - a sly version of : "Sonny, you can do it for free don't you? You'll get a lollypop, exclusive!". There is no work around. You won't persuade the buyer, the intermediary of your service that preparation time and the money that should but doesn't come with it would benefit anyone, starting from the end user of interpretation : das Klient! They won't buy into it, they know they will find someone, anyone else ready to raise hands and accept for viler price to deliver, something. Are you knowledgeable in thin film PV cells, the whole gamut of it down to the speaks of lab researchers? You bet I am! Just give me a few hours to get the big picture, but would you be so kind as to pay my time getting elements of that big picture? More than ever from now on, besides the possibility to simply quit this profession, the single center of interest must be the art of getting ready under any circumstances.

What interpreters need to know

OPI, over the phone interpretation, is that stupid industry where you are supposed to deliver on mostly any subject, a capela, and often, out of the blue. Self-quoted answer to a intermediary asking the usual question that sometimes just get on your nerves:

"As for the question about my "familiarity with the topic and/or terminology involved", this is the
usual plain joke. There is not a single interpreter on planet Earth with familiarity on such arcane topic. Interpreters are familiar with technics to prepare for mostly any subject although they do not get paid for the preparation task."

OPI interpreters are asked to perform what any professional pilot would absolutely decline to do : fly with no flight preparation and fuzzy maps at best.

Another lost opportunity

"Japan's star midfielder Shunsuke Nakamura will not have to worry about being lost in translation at his new club Espanyol - because he will have no interpreter at his side."

Reasons? Forced immersion :

""We want him to get accustomed to the environment as soon as possible," Espanyol manager Mauricio Pochettino said, explaining the reason for not hiring an interpreter for Nakamura, according to the Sports Nippon."

Or was it the cost factor of maintaining an interpreter-attendent?

"It is the first time that Nakamura will be without a personal interpreter in his past seven years in European football - the first three with Italy's Reggina and the rest with the former Scottish champions Celtic."

You don't get it : someone will take care of him :

"Instead, a Japanese strategy analyst in Espanyol's B team will come to his rescue in the event of any linguistic trouble."

Now, the burning question is : what the hell is "a Japanese strategy analyst in Espanyol's B team"?

But after all, for soccer players, communication comes down more or less to kicking the ball :

"An Espanyol official told the daily: "The manager has repeatedly checked Nakamura on DVD and given high marks to his high ability to understand tactics."

"The manager said that there will be no problem at all, even without an interpreter, once he stands on the pitch and kicks the ball.""

The great full article is here.

The mediocrity we thrive in

I don't like to comment on the news, copy paste a link to an article about a weird story and participate in the "community" jeering, remote winks and guffaws. Simply because that group sneering, all the more in professional settings, is but a poor band-aid slapped onto something that hurts so much you had better laugh about it. You had better laugh about looming professional mediocrity and hide the shame of reckoning that there's nothing you can do against it. Nothing will make the French La Tribune stop attempting at providing other-than-French web content using translation software. They might stop out of the bad image the stupidity of all this has been generating. But it is too late. The worm is in the fruit. Someone has reckon that machine translation muck was well enough a feed to feed readers in other language, a polluted feed, at times decipherable, at times simply meaningless. It's good enough. It saves money. It's the way of the future. You skip the corrector. That is, you skip paying for a corrector. You put instead a single young lad "in charge of managing" the (muck) task. Every jeering and sly innuendo including this one is showing through the seams how powerless responses are. You can of course feel content you work in a domain perfectly safe from this insanity, let's say, patent translation. You can feel safe, like treading on a hip of trash downing sturdy boots knowing you won't get you feet soiled. Bu the mind is soiled. Someone at the top of a top publication covering domains - economy, politics, business - that are deemed important has not only thought that machine translation was palatable enough, but came as far as implementing it. No jeering will wipe out the moral, professional stain and stench. It sucks to the level of nausea, the mediocrity we thrive in.

A nodding acquaintance

"Interpreters need to have a nodding acquaintance with a varied range of different issues". I picked this snippet from the UK National Network for Interpreting. Good, clear basic explanations on what interpreting is all about. But it's not enough nodding at the need to get nodding acquaintance with varied subjects. Cram strategies to go beyond nodding without expecting turning into a specialist is a key subject in itself when you work as a ubiquitous interpreter, a jack of all trade, almost. One agency outside Japan contacted me for a potential stint. I skip the exact subject but quote this : "The interpreter needs to have a strong IT background ...". Does such expectation meet reality? It could, depending on the circumstances. There are in-house interpreters working in automobile. They have strong automobile background. There are not available on the freelance market. I assume there may be interpreters working in a single subject, but by far and large, interpreters are multi-subjects oriented and strive to get quickly acquainted with new stuff. What with over the phone interpretation when background info is close to nil? The proper answer to an agent would be that "I am highly confident I can meet your client's expectations because although I am no IT engineer, I am highly competent at going beyond nodding acquaintance." Now, building that competence is key.