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 

A few days of training, a lifetime of opportunities: getting started as a professional medical interpreter

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.