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.

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!

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!!! 

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!