Thursday, December 1, 2011

Still singin' the blues!!

Hello all my almost non-existent followers, here I am, back again.  I must say that today, I am blogging in a probably futile effort to stop feeling like I am wasting so much time fiddling around on the Internet.  I suppose that it MIGHT be possible that the hours I have been spending tweeting, reading others' blogs, promoting myself by every possible means, and of course, wasting time on Facebook, have not been all in vain, but today, I feel like they have been!!  I troll through ProZ every single day looking for jobs to bid on, but I am losing faith that I will ever GET a translation assignment this way.  I HAVE ostensibly been recruited by 4 agencies through the site, but as yet, none of these purported recruitments have resulted in any work.

I did go to Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, with my expenses paid for by the World University Service of Canada, to work as an interpreter at their Forum.  It was a great experience!!  In fact, as I write this....I remember that I have not followed up with the contacts I made there.  Aargh!!  Am I falling into the trap of going down rabbit holes on the web, and not doing the things I should actually be doing to concretely promote my business?!  Why am I so distractable???   On the other hand, my very distractability does lead me to some interesting discoveries.

One thing I noticed recently during my "research" on the Internet was an article about hope.  http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/good-news/hope-better-predictor-academic-achievement-intelligence-191430642.html

If it's a great predictor of academic achievement, it must be so as well in business.  Perseverance is ALSO touted as one of the main ways to succeed.  I posted something about that on Facebook a couple of months ago and in my stronger moments, I remind myself that it's one of the main predictors of success.

In fact, I have no fewer than 10 business leads right now.  I just need to figure out how to make them come through!!

And I need to keep myself in that hopeful state, and keep on persevering.  It's easier to give this advice to others sometimes than it is to follow it myself.

Another good tip I just got from David, my partner, when he dropped in unexpectedly at lunchtime and found me wallowing in my distractibility....if you have approached 10 people and gotten 1 result, but you need 10 results...get going and approach 100 people!!  If you don't ask for it, it won't fall into your lap.

All good advice.  Be hopeful, be upbeat.  Persevere.  And put yourself out there!

OK.  I'm ready to get back to work now.  I love how writing clarifies my thoughts.  Back to the grind!!

Thursday, November 3, 2011

¿Cómo ponerle precio a tu traducción?

Acabo de leer un blog acerca del precio de las traducciones y realmente, para la persona que está iniciando como traductor/a, es bien difícil saber cuánto se debe de cobrar.  La cosa es que traducir es más que saber dos idiomas.  Aquí hay una presentación que hice para un curso de traduccíón que tomé en la universidad, acerca del análisis textual.  Con todo lo que hay que considerar para efectuar una traducción, ¿será de extrañarse que cuesta saber cuánto cobrar?

Este texto es largo y un poco técnico pero toca muchas de las complejidades que tiene que tomar en cuenta el traductor al hacer su trabajo.  Y si le encuentran errores, ya comprenderán porque no se debe de traducir hacia la lengua que no es la materna! (Yo soy angloparlante :)


Análisis textual

Vocabulario:
exegesis o exégesis.
(Del gr. ξγησις, explicación, relato).
1. f. Explicación, interpretación.
eslabón.
(Quizá del gót. *snôbô; cf. a. al. ant. snuoba, cinta, lazo).
1. m. Pieza en forma de anillo o de otra curva cerrada que enlazada con otras forma cadena. U. t. en sent. fig.

acervo.
(Del lat. acervus).
1. m. Conjunto de bienes morales o culturales acumulados por tradición o herencia.
2. m. Haber que pertenece en común a varias personas, sean socios, coherederos, acreedores, etc.
3. m. Montón de cosas menudas, como trigo, cebada, legumbres, etc.
~ comunitario.
1. m. Der. Conjunto de prácticas, decisiones y criterios con los que se han venido interpretando y aplicando los tratados constitutivos de las Comunidades Europeas.


Análisis Textual

El análisis textual intenta desenredar los enlaces complicados que le dan significado al texto.  Va más allá de las palabras y el estilo de lo escrito para analizar la relación entre las ideas que contiene el texto y el ámbito cultural e histórico en donde operan el autor y hasta cierto punto el lector. 

El texto no solamente cuenta una narrativa sino que también hace referencia explicita o implícitamente a un universo de conocimientos.  Esto es importante para los traductores, y se puede expresar con más sencillez recordando que como traductores, necesitamos para lograr una traducción bien hecha no solamente saber las palabras sino que conocer el contexto cultural desde el cual se ha producido el texto y de ahí saberlo relacionar al contexto cultural del lector meta. El lector aportará también sus propias ideas y formas de entender el mundo al texto ya traducido. 

Para comprender un texto, entonces, necesitamos de un conocimiento práctico y concreto del significado de las palabras, necesitamos tener familiaridad con los conocimientos de la disciplina que se trate, y también necesitamos de un conocimiento más amplio y general, el conocimiento enciclopédico.

Umberto Eco dice que para que un texto se actualice,  es necesario que el lector aporte su colaboración.  Cuando el lector también es traductor, esta colaboración se vuelve más activa y el resultado cobra más peso por el hecho de que la traducción representa la única forma por la cual el lector meta puede aproximarse al texto.  Cuando se traduce es necesario tomar decisiones que, quiera que no, fácilmente puedan alterar el valor implícito y explícito del texto y por ende alterar su equilibrio.  El traductor es el eslabón entre el texto y el lector y su responsabilidad es grande.

El capítulo diferencia entonces dos tipos de conocimiento:

-los conocimientos vinculados a la competencia disciplinaria (léxicos y temáticos)
-los conocimientos vinculados a la competencia enciclopédica o el bagaje cultural

Se necesita una labor de búsqueda enciclopédica cuando hay una referencia en el texto de origen no comprendida.

Cuando se trata de la cultura anglosajona por ejemplo se suelen emplear muchas referencias intertextuales a la Biblia y a las obras de Shakespeare.  También son comunes las referencias a las rimas infantiles y a los conocimientos escolares. 

Tener en cuenta todo esto cuando se traduce implica un continuo compromiso con el aprendizaje, lo cual nos ayudará a comprender las referencias extratextuales.  El texto compara la traducción a un iceberg, con la mayor parte debajo de la superficie.  El traductor tiene que poner de su curiosidad y su responsabilidad para esclarecer las dudas o ambigüedades.

El ámbito textual

Cada oración en el texto se tiene que relacionar con las oraciones que están alrededor y el texto en su conjunto.  Es necesario reajustar y modificar el texto traducido a medida que se va traduciendo, de acuerdo con las exigencias semánticas y estilísticas contrastadas del texto original y la traducción.  La homogeneidad en la textura y el registro (el grado de formalidad del lenguaje) son de especial importancia.

La unidad de traducción

La palabra, la oración y el párrafo: todos se tienen que analizar en su contexto pero también hay que ver al texto en si como unidad.  Cada texto tiene su carácter social, su cierre semántico y comunicativo y su coherencia profunda y superficial según las reglas del nivel textual y de la lengua.

Los teóricos Vinay y Darbelnet consideran que cada pensamiento es una unidad léxica y que esa es la unidad de traducción (o sea, la palabra). 

La teoría de la traducción de Gideon Toury postula una unidad que se llama textema:

Texteme:  a linguistic unit of any type and level participating in textual relationships and as a result carrying textual functions in the text in question.

Peter Newmark concibe que la unidad de traducción es un segmento del texto original a partir del cual el traductor puede emprender su reformulación en otra lengua y que la escala de esa unidad varía según las exigencias del texto en cuestión y la cual describe así:

The largest quantity of translation in a text is done at the level of the word, the lexical unit, the collocation, the group, the clause and the sentence--rarely the paragraph, never the text—probably in that order.  

Sin embargo contrasta con Newman el concepto de los teóricos del análisis de discurso que consideran que la unidad de traducción es todo el texto.

La lectura del texto

Comprensión:  análisis, exégesis, descodificación

Comprende:

El texto original
La intencionalidad del autor hasta donde se puede averiguar
El traductor
La lengua
La cultura
El público receptor

Objetivo: extraer todo el contenido  y el valor expresivo del texto y reformularlo en la lengua de llegada

El lector aporta:

Sus conocimientos lingüísticos y culturales
Sus experiencias y opiniones personales

Cada lector construye el sentido según estos factores

El traductor hace más, se convierte en portavoz del autor y en autor del texto traducido

Se quiere evitar cualquier omisión o añadidura pero a veces son exigidas por el esclarecimiento del sentido o por las características sintácticas o estilísticas específicas de la lengua meta

Se debe de consultar no solo diccionarios sino obras especializadas, expertos en la lengua y tema del texto original y en casos especiales al autor mismo

Perspectivas analíticas y tipologías
El análisis textual cuenta con múltiples enfoques y métodos propuestos desde la teoría y la práctica de la traducción con perspectivas de:

-la gramática generativa y transformacional
.la semántica
-la sociolingüística
-la semiótica
-la teoría de la comunicación
-la lingüística del texto
-la crítica literaria, etc.

Se requiere de un período de iniciación y práctica para familiarizarse con las técnicas y destrezas de estas perspectivas pero luego deben de formar parte de un análisis polifacético rutinario para el traductor.

Los distintos enfoques analíticos se complementan, enriquecen nuestro conocimiento del texto de partida y llegan a sugerir pautas para la recreación del texto a través de la traducción.

Elementos a considerar:

El género.  Boletín meteorológico, cuento infantil, obituario, etc.
Habrá convenciones estilísticas para cada género.  A veces no coinciden las estructuras sintácticas que los caracterizan.  Ejemplo, las recetas de cocina emplean el imperativo en inglés y la voz pasiva en español. 

La forma convencional para cada género puede variar según el idioma.

También hay intentos de clasificar a los textos según su funcionalidad.  Para Karl Buhler la funcionalidad es diferente para cada enfoque comunicativo:  para el emisor la función es expresiva, para el contenido del enunciado la función es referencial o representativa, para el receptor la función es connotativa o apelativa.

Katharina Reiss propone cuatro tipos de clasificación:

a.  Informativo ie textos científicos- centrado en el contenido
b.  Expresivo ie literatura- centrado en la expresión y el emisor
c.  Apelativo u operativo ie material publicitario- centrado en el receptor
d.  Subsidiario ie canciones, programas de radio, textos de medios audiovisuales y de comunicación

Sin embargo reducir los textos a una única función dominante ha provocado muchas críticas y ha suscitado modelos alternativos que admiten la multifuncionalidad de los textos y también consideran el marco comunicativo del texto y el tema.

Más recientemente Hatim y Mason ofrecen al traductor una tipología basada en tres tipos textuales principales: 
1.  El expositivo:  exposición conceptual, narración y descripción.  El discurso es imparcial en relación con los hechos y conceptos, solo intenta informar

2. El argumentativo:  Argumentación sostenida y contraargumentación.  El discurso cumple una función evaluativa.

3.  El exhortivo o instructivo:  Los autores distinguen dos tipos:  con opción o sin opción.  Por ejemplo, cuando el lector puede rechazar la propuesta, como con un anuncio o un contrato.  El discurso es operativo y tiene la meta de provocar un comportamiento en el lector. 

Como traductores analizamos la función del texto porque nos ayuda a agudizar la visión durante la fase de análisis y esto nos ayuda a determinar cuales metodologías son las más adecuadas para la traducción.  Para el lector, los marcos de la funcionalidad del texto lo ayudan en la comprensión porque puede predecir como interpretar el texto según su función.  Es un tipo de redundancia que ayuda al lector. 

El tejido discursivo entonces se conforma de muchos elementos:

La cohesión sintáctica—usar las estructuras gramaticales adecuadas.  A veces un elemento que no tiene coherencia sintáctica cuando se considera aisladamente adquiere significado en el contexto. (elementos deícticos, anáfora, catáfora, pronombres referenciales). Example from the Bible:  Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand.  And when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.  Who? 
Also, su=his, her, yours, theirs, your, their. 

La coherencia semántica—usar las palabras que tienen el sentido adecuado.  El sentido varía según el contexto. Cuidado con los campos semánticos:  cognados parciales o falsos...

La pragmática—respetar la función del texto y traducir según esto.  Las funciones tienen formas aceptadas que varían según pautas culturales.

El contexto de la situación—respetar el contorno global tanto lingüístico como cultural y social desde el punto de vista del autor y el lector.  Por supuesto esto varía mucho y tiene casi un sinfín de aspectos. 

Robert de Beaugrande y Wolfgang Dressler describen otras pautas del discurso:

La intencionalidad
La aceptabilidad
La informatividad
La situacionalidad
La intertextualidad


Parámetros de discurso:

Campo, tenor y modo

Campo: ¿Qué es lo que ocurre en la situación comunicativa en la que el texto se genera y funciona?  El campo incluye el tema. 

El contexto:  quién, dónde, cuándo y por qué?
El registro:  qué, cómo y porqué?  Depende del contexto y el campo.

El modo: ¿ Cual es la función del texto dentro de la comunicación y cual es el canal de comunicación?  (hablado o escrito).  El género forma parte del modo y también la tipología del texto basada en la función retórica del discurso (expositiva, argumentativa, exhortativa, etc.)

El tenor: se refiere a los participantes del acto de comunicación y la interrelación que existe entre ellos.  Incluye el grado de formalidad o informalidad, intimidad o distancia entre los participantes, el ámbito público o privado

¿Quiere corregir, enmendar o agregar algo? Bienvenidos los comentarios.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Here's a picture of a lovely valley on the way to las Aguas Georginas in Quetzaltenango. Patchwork valleys of crops speak to us whether they are in Guatemala or Canada!
Posted by Picasa

Cultural Interpretation vs. Linguistic Interpretation

I just got back from week 4 of the interpreter's training, which prepares community interpreters to take the ILSAT test.  It´s going well and is perhaps more thorough than I expected it to be.  We have looked at the knowledge, skills and attributes of an interpreter, effective communication, the constituent tasks of interpreting, ethical principles and standards of practice, how to introduce ourselves, the terminology of interpretation itself as well as legal and medical terminology, confidentiality, assertiveness, and role boundaries, and done quite a lot of memory exercises also.  We have also spent time examining our own cultural values and the impact they can have on our ability to interpret with impartiality, and we have learned some guidelines for note-taking.

I recently heard of the CILISAT but I just looked it up and from what I can see, it's pretty much the same as the ILSAT-CI is Cultural Interpreter, however.  I attended an event at Glendon College (York University) on Wednesday, in celebration of  International Translation Day, which was yesterday.  There, I enjoyed a presentation by Lola Bendana, the President of the International Medical Interpreters Association.  Her presentation was an invitation to interpreters to both join the association, and to volunteer to help in disaster zones, where medical interpreters are needed to save lives.  In the same vein, I sat in on part of a presentation at ProZ.com, where I am a member, titled 
By Eric Candle.  As I watched this presentation, I became aware that this US-based medical interpretation training incorporates cultural interpretation, whereas in the training that I am now receiving, we are being taught NOT to act as cultural mediators/interpreters.  For example, if a patient says to the Doctor, "Creo que le hicieron ojo a mi hijo y por eso se le cayó la mollera.", I am just to interpret--saying to the Doctor, "I think someone put the evil eye on my son and that's why his soft spot is sunken."  I'm not supposed to tell the Doctor that it is firmly believed by many in Guatemala that if your child is uncovered and you go about your business where everyone can see the child, you are exposing the child to "the evil eye".  I would also not inform the Doctor that the red string tied around the child's wrist is there to protect against said potential harm. This impartial approach is the one advocated in the Interpretation Training that I am taking now.
During our training, I must say that this prohibition on filling in the medical professional on the cultural beliefs of the patient seemed like it might be a barrier to understanding.  As an untrained interpreter, I have instinctively provided this type of information to the service provider when I interpret, but according to the training that I am receiving now, I must neither add to nor take away from the message.  
 
However, as Eric points out in his presentation, Spanish is spoken in over twenty countries around the world, and there are substantial cultural differences in the linguistic expression even though in real terms the language is the same.  For example, in Guatemala, still quite a stratified society, the title Don, which equates roughly to Mr., is common as a sign of respect.  Historically it was the obligatory mode of address of peons towards their masters;  in my experience, today it is a title of respect, and I have heard many people of higher status use this title when speaking to those of lower status for whom they intended to convey their respect. So while it carries nuances that speak to historical social inequalities that have not disappeared, its usage has become more fluid and it does not necessarily evoke a master/peon type of relationship.  However, I once interpreted for a Cuban gentleman, and he became visibly offended when I addressed him as Don.  After the appointment, he explained to me that titles like Don had been outlawed in Cuba because they do evoke disparity of status.  For me, after so many years living in Guatemala, it is very difficult to get away from the habit of addressing someone as Don.  It feels disrespectful to me;  whereas to my Cuban acquaintance, it was quite disturbing for him when I addressed him as Don. This type of cultural nuance is not found in the dictionary when you look up the word "don".  In the training that I am receiving, if some kind of a cultural miscommunication like this occurs, I am not supposed to explain any of its nuances to the unilingual service provider for whom I am interpreting.  I must admit that when it comes down to actually doing my job, I am going to find it difficult to curb my need to clarify cultural context.  Where will I draw the line between explaining because I can see that the message is not being fully conveyed without a supplementary explanation, and sticking to the obviously logical edict that I neither add to nor subtract from the message?  

This reminds me of the faithfulness/betrayal debate in translation.  There is a spectrum of ways to translate, from literal or word-for-word, which often does not convey the meaning very clearly, to a very adaptive type of translation that considers that as long as the deep kernel of meaning has been conveyed, the words or surface structure are not that critical.  If you don't speak two languages, you can still understand how this might work.  It's like the difference between saying, "Shut the door, it's bloody freezing out!"  and "Please close the door because the temperature has dropped significantly."  The meaning is the same;  the elocutionary force and register (level of formality) are both quite different.  On a cultural level, the dislocation would be more obvious between choice of words, and it's easy to spot these differences that have mostly to do with dialect. In Britain:  "Let's take the lorry since Mum has the car;  we'll go over to the flat, but I am going to drive because I don't want you to go up the kerb again!"  Replace lorry with pickup, Mum with Mom, flat with apartment, and kerb with curb, and you're in America.  But the differences in the example I gave above in Spanish go much deeper than choice of vocabulary and into differences in worldview, differences that are deeply rooted in cultural and political history. 

These differences can spring from such a wide spectrum of historical and sociopolitical factors that it is indeed a daunting task to try to explain them to someone who is not aware of them.  However, I am sure that part of the message would be lost if none of these differences were acknowledged.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Onward and Upward!

Last night I was surfing around the Conestoga College website, about to sign up (and pay for!) Module 1 of the Interpreter´s Training, which is to take place two nights a week for 3 hours per night, and would have meant driving over to Kitchener twice a week.  Today at about 11:30 a.m., I got a call from the Interpretation Coordinator at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, letting me know that I am being invited to participate in the same training, to be carried out by the K-W Multicultural Centre, for free!  The courses will be held on Saturdays.  I missed the same training last year because of having been booked to do the simultaneous interpretation for the Bolivian ex-Minister of Agriculture on the same day as the course began.  I am SO excited and happy to be invited to do this in an alternate fashion.  Commitments on either evenings or weekends mean being away from my family, but I think Saturdays are better than evenings, and making one trip per week instead of two is better too.  Also, I will be getting to know the coordinators of the interpretation services in K-W, which is good, because I believe that work will come out of the networking opportunity.  I will be taking the training related to domestic violence as well.  Having the complete ILSAT certification is now a pre-requisite for working as an interpreter with the Multicultural Centres of Guelph and Kitchener, and no doubt any other places as well.  I was taken on as an interpreter by Social Services of Wellington County before the ILSAT system was implemented, but it definitely looks like it will be needed if I am to expand my market and get more work.  I recently found out that it is also required now for court interpreters, which may be why I never got a call-back for the permanent part-time court interpretation position that I applied for in Brampton in June.  I still think it is very strange for the ATIO not to validate the training in any way.  On the other hand, it seems beyond the scope of the training to examine anything other than theoretical topics, when they are training people from many languages in one course.  I will find out soon enough how they go about it, and will be taking careful note of their methodology in order to compare it to the requirements of the ATIO.

When speaking with Wendy Greene, an accredited conference interpreter in Toronto whose language pairs are French and English, she told me that community interpreters are the poor cousins of the interpretation world.  Salaries for conference interpretation are in the $800 per day range, whereas community interpretation pays a paltry $24.00 per hour, give or take a few cents, at least where I work.  Conference interpreters work in half hour shifts, and in pairs to spell each other off, and according to Wendy if I remember correctly, a full day´s work is considered to be three shifts of half an hour each! Which adds up to....drum roll....$533.00 per hour.  QUITE THE DISCREPANCY!!  For what is almost the same work.  On the other hand, to be an accredited conference interpreter, you have to have a Master´s degree...and the prerequisite for this interpreter´s training is a high school diploma, and passing a language proficiency test.  I´m still a little muddy on my understanding of whether you can EVER be a conference interpreter without the Master´s degree.  For translation, if you don´t have a degree, you can become a candidate for certification with the ATIO with a 600,000-word portfolio of professionally done work, whereas with a degree, you must assemble a 200,000-word portfolio.

The drawback to the community interpretation gig, apart from the less than fabulous earnings, is the fact that you have to piece together your work hours and in my case, I´m lucky if I get half a dozen per MONTH at the agency where I work.  It´s been working for me as a supplement to my income, especially since I am a 5-minute bike ride away from the office where appointments are held, but I am not sure how much sense it would make to take jobs in Kitchener when the time comes, if it´s a 40-minute commute over there and back for an hour of work. 

It´s a tangled web for interpreters in Ontario.  Stay tuned for the next post, where I will delve further into questions of certification, language proficiency, and hoop-jumping!

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Accreditation confusion for interpreters in Ontario

Time has flown once again...however my blog posts ARE getting closer together!  I have been super busy on the home front and although I have been accepted into the Master's program at UofG for French in Context, I have decided to defer until next fall to concentrate on building up my translation and interpretation business.  I am excited to have won a contract in July to translate almost 24,000 words from Spanish to English for ODScore, working with a local auto parts manufacturer that has factories around the world, including Mexico.  This project was a lot of fun.  I just love digging into the translation and finding the mot juste.  I noticed a lot of verbs that are transitive in one language and intransitive in the other as I worked on this big translation.  There was quite a range of registers in the texts as well, and I found the need to hone in on that and make sure that I was conveying the tone in that sense.  All in all...a great learning experience.  Translating in the age of easily available Internet dictionaries is a wonderful thing.  Imagine having to cross-reference words whose meaning crosses semantic fields with an ink-and-paper BOOK!!  It would be far more time-consuming. 

I am especially happy to have gotten this big contract because it adds significantly to my portfolio.  Now that I have my Spanish degree, I need 200,000 words of professionally translated text for my portfolio to be admitted as a candidate for certification to the ATIO-the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario.  I have actually got quite a few translations that I have done over the past few years but I have yet to tally them up.  Time to get going on making up my portfolio-they accept only hard copies. 

Still haven't heard back about the results of the ILSAT!  I am looking forward to finding out my score.  75% is a pass and I am sure that I have passed. 

When I called the ATIO to ask about certification as an interpreter, I was a little surprised to find out that they have no official position on the ILSAT program.  This means that I can take 6 college-level courses in interpretation theory and pass a language and interpretation proficiency test that accredits me to work with both the federal and provincial government in Ontario, and none of it is recognized by the professional association of interpreters and translators!  This is just weird.  The status of credentialization in the profession is in disarray, I must conclude.  This speaks to the general lack of understanding of translation, interpretation, and localization as professions.  I have begun following Glendon's School of Translation Facebook page, and this is a commment that seems to come up quite often.

 Well, I am on a tight deadline to get more work, so I had better get back to the execution of my business plan. It is just awesome having my partner, David de Weerdt, helping me to refine this aspect of my work.  As the CEO of his own company and a former business development officer, among other things, he gives darned good advice.  Thanks David!!! 

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The freelance interpreter's news...or is that blues?

Here it is, summer already!  How fast did that time fly.  My spring courses have been over for almost two months, during which time I have been doing odd translations and continuing to interpret for County of Wellington.  I have also been in touch with the director of the Interpreter's training and accreditation program at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.  A new federal/provincial interpreter's standard has been put into place over the past couple of years and it is now possible to take Interpreter's training at many of the community colleges in Ontario.  I was invited to take the first round of this training which began last fall, but I declined, in part because of my full course load during my last semester of my Spanish degree at the University of Guelph, and in part because I had been booked to do a simultaneous interpretation at the University for a conference organized by the Toronto Bolivia Solidarity Network on the very day that the training began.  It's pretty ironic that I opted out of the training in order to get my first chance at being inside the interpreter's booth! I'm kind of sorry that I missed that, not least because the first round was free and now each module costs a couple of hundred dollars.  On the other hand, being in the booth and the extremely laudatory comments that I received after completing my assignment at the conference have led me to conclude that I have a natural gift for simultaneous interpretation and that I should be pursuing it as a career option.

I took the final exam for interpreters at Immigrant Services two weeks ago.  The test is called ILSAT-the Interpreter's Language Skills and Assessment Test.  The new accreditation system consists of the 6 interpreter's training modules now available at community colleges AND the test. It will take up to 2 months to get my results back from the test, which consists of a sight translation of two documents (one English, one Spanish);  these were a consent to medical treatment for a victim of sexual assault (English to Spanish); and a victim impact statement (Spanish to English).  Sight translation involves reading the document and speaking it aloud in the target language.  This was not too challenging for me except for a couple of quite long sentences where I stumbled over ordering the clauses, and a couple of words that don't translate-for example, the word "item" in English does not have an exact translation into Spanish. Circumlocution to the rescue!  I can always explain a word if I can't find the exact translation for it in my mental lexicon.  The second part of the exam was a consecutive interpretation of a dialogue between the victim of a domestic assault and a service provider.  I felt quite confident about this part of the exam;  the only thing I would have done differently is to have quickly jotted down the woman's address when she gave it to the person interviewing her.  My short-term memory failed me in perfectly recalling her house number, street and postal code. 

In my job as an intepreter for Social Services, the type of interpretation that I do is consecutive, as it was in the test I just described.  What a different dynamic when doing a simultaneous interpretetation!  I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to do a simultaneous interpretation last Nov. 6th at the conference, titled "Canada-Bolivia Relations in the Next Decade".  In the a.m., I interpreted from English into Spanish for a presentation given by  Dr. Paul Kellogg, of Athabasca University - What does the Bolivian experience mean for Canada and other developed countries?

Dr. Kellogg is a dynamic speaker (euphemism alert)--in fact he spoke a mile a minute and conference organizer Dr. Judy Rebick had to ask him several times to slow down, not just because of the difficulty that his rate of delivery was causing for the interpreter but because even the English speakers in the audience were having trouble keeping up with him!!  The only unilingual Spanish speaker in attendance at the conference was Dr. Hugo Salvatierra, former Minister of Agriculture of Bolivia, and therefore he was the only one wearing the headset and receiving my interpretation into Spanish.  I touched base with him after the almost hour-long presentation given by Dr. Kellogg and apologized for being simply unable to keep up with the speech (given at ludicrous speed-faster than the speed of light-cf Spaceballs).  To my delight, Dr. Salvatierra said that after a halting start he felt that I had done a good job.  As the most fluent of the student interpreters invited to volunteer our services for the conference, I was asked to do both of the main presentations of the day. 

Well, that was the first of my reassurances that I might actually have some natural talent at simultaneous interpretation.  In the afternoon, I interpreted Dr. Salvatierra's speech for those conference attendees who were not fluent in Spanish, as well as for some of those who are fluently bilingual but who I presume just wanted to see how well I would do (Dr. Gomez, Dr. Yovanovich of the School of Languages and Literature at the UofG, among others).  This speech was far easier to interpret, firstly because Dr. Salvatierra has a lovely oratorical style, with the measured pacing and clear delivery of a very experienced public speaker, and secondly because I was interpreting into my native English.  It seemed natural to speak slowly, drawing out the clauses as I spoke them in English while I waited for Dr. Salvatierra to pronounce units of meaning that are found at different placements in the two languages--my measured pacing allowed me to process the sentence and put the elements in their proper order in English, even when portions of the sentence that belong at the beginning in English were not spoken until the middle or the end of the sentence in Spanish.

Dr. Salvatierra's speech lasted for almost an hour.  At first, I watched him as he spoke, but after only a few sentences I realized that the visual distraction was impeding my interpretation and I closed my eyes to focus inward on the meaning and on the aural stimulus.  The degree of concentration required to do a simultaneous interpretation is intense and I honestly didn't realize how much effort I was expending until the speech ended.  I felt quite shell-shocked and removed the headset to feel like I was drooping into my seat.  I barely registered the comment of Glenn Crosse, the gentleman who travels with the sound booth equipment.  He praised me for my measured and even delivery, telling me that he had rarely heard an interpreter do a better job at keeping the flow of the discourse, and explaining to me that a choppy delivery is the worst problem with simultaneous interpretations because it will quickly exhaust the listener.  "You were amazing.  That was great!" 

I finally began to get my bearings again at which point I realized the significance of Glenn's comments.  If he travels with the equipment....to all the conferences...he hears all the interpreters...and he is telling me I was extraordinary....this is good!!!

I came down to join Drs. Rebick and Salvatierra where they were talking excitedly about the speech, and was extremely gratified when Dr. Rebick approached me and congratulated me with words to the effect that she had almost never heard anyone interpret as well as I had.  "I have been to lots of conferences and heard lots of interpreters, but I have almost never heard someone as good as you."

So there you have it.  These positive comments have given me the impetus to pursue interpretation as a career and I will be posting again soon about the ins and outs of getting a foot in the door as an interpreter. 

  

Friday, January 28, 2011

End of January

Here it is the last weekend in January already.  I am back at school, having decided to get back into studying French, and I have decided to begin the French in Context Master's Program at the University of Guelph in September.  It focuses on didactics of FSL, sociolinguistics, and literary translation.

It is a very strange feeling to be dipping my toes back into the waters of French after such a long absence of familiarity with la belle langue.  I was so fluent in French when I left Paris in 1988 that I could fool some of people I met into thinking I was French, at least for a little while!  My years of immersion in Spanish and now, 5 years of studying it at the University level have meant that French has receded from my awareness.

My French is still pretty good though, if I do say so myself!  I am sure that I can get to a much higher level pretty quickly with some sustained study.

I LOVE LINGUISTICS!  I am taking one course where we study the French of Quebec.  I would dearly love to spend some time in PQ and get an ear for the joual.  In fact, next week we are going to start a series of transcription exercises where we listen to the speaker and transcribe as accurately as possible what has been said.  It will be quite the challenge once we get to the real Quebec French.

In the meantime I have been doing a little translating work into both French and Spanish, and teaching some private Spanish classes.  I have also been corresponding with the head of the Translation Program at Glendon College at York University.  They are adding a Master's in Conference Interpretation Program in 2012 and will be kicking off the program with some summer courses this summer.

After I did such a great job interpreting (simultaneous)  for Hugo Salvatierra, former Minister of Agriculture of Bolivia, at that conference organized by Judy Rebick at the UofG on Nov. 6, 2010, I decided I would try to become a certified conference interpreter.  There are only 3 places in North America that offer certification programs for interpretation!  The Monterey Institute of International Affairs in California, the Vancouver Community College, and the University of Ottawa.  So I am very excited that I will be able to study this at York if I decide to go in that direction.  My year doing a Master's in French should bring me back up to speed.

Well, I am off for a well-deserved moment of leisure...going to relax with a book in French!