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. 

  

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!  

Shedding the old, embracing the new

I have been thinking a huge amount lately about change.  I am in a transition phase of my life as I complete my Honours Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from the University of Guelph.  I can hardly believe that I have finished this degree!  It has been a beautiful and fulfilling 5 and a half years...I am almost a different person than I was when I began.

In many ways of course I am the same:  still a single mother of four beautiful children, still a Canadian woman, still a linguist by nature and focus, and still a lover of gourmet coffee.  And in many ways I have changed and grown:  I am more self-confident, more aware of my skills and attributes as compared to those of my peers, and far better prepared to face the challenge of supporting myself and my family.  I think I have finally gotten over the culture shock that accompanied me like a pair of invisible tinted glasses for the first 5 years of my life back in my home country after 17 years as an ex-pat in Mexico, Guatemala and France. 

Culture shock is a strange concept.  It took me quite some time to understand that I would probably have experienced a pretty severe culture shock if I had left rural PEI and come straight to Southern Ontario, without leaving the country at all!  Oh Canada, so huge and so diverse!  In lovely Guelph I have finally found a place where I feel like I belong.  My peripatetic upbringing meant that I had never lived in the same place for longer than 5 years, and indeed, had spent 1 year or less in most of the 20 or so places we had lived when I was growing up.  My amazing and weird childhood has made me into the resilient adult I am today, but I have always longed for roots, and now I finally feel like I have put some down.  It's a pleasure to see my children cycle through the schools as they get older, and though we have moved across the river, this means that now that some of them are in high school they have rediscovered old friends they had not seen since primary school.  The oldest friends I am in contact with are the ones I met as a 12-year-old...no kindergarten friends for me :(

On the other hand, I have friends in BC and PEI, in France, the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala, and a lot of wonderful friends here in Guelph.  Life is good!

I am really looking forward to stretching my wings as a writer now that I have a little more free time.  Here's to the blessing of literacy!