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.
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.
1 comment:
I loved the story of your Simultaneous Interpretation experience. What more arduous test of your Spanish to English translation skills could there be? And in the same afternoon you translated the rapid-fire English of other participants to Spanish, as well!
Great things are ahead for the most astonishing mind for language that I know.
Post a Comment