A Gift for Consecutive

Consecutive interpreting is of two types. The kind done by Expert Conference Interpreters is the long or full kind. In this, speakers go on for several minutes without stopping and the interpreters have to translate it all afterwards. Except for a few interpreters who have phenomenal memories, they take notes.

Some people have a natural gift for it. We used to hold an annual schools visit day at the University of Ottawa, when the School of Translation and Interpretation would try to give high school students a taste of what our work was like. One of the highlights was when we sat them in the interpretation lab and put them through them an exercise in simultaneous and consecutive. One year, a 15-year-old girl with no training or experience amazed me by giving a perfect consecutive rendition of an uninterrupted three-minute speech, a test usually performed by advanced students of the School.

Now Lionel Dersot has something interesting to say about consecutive interpreting ability. For the full account, go to his blog via the Liaison Interpreter in Japan link on the right of this page.

Here’s the source passage:

"If 100% of the population would eat fish at least once per week as recommended, there would be a need for an additional 148,380 tons of finished products, that is about twice as much in terms of raw catches."

And Lionel’s commentary (with my emphasis):

“With this kind of mathematics like a formula pattern of speech where the subject and vocabulary are not a major barrier for interpreting, only the logical minded students showed strong mastery. Real strong. I was stunned by the rendering and weaving in action (the concentration, some with eyes almost closed) of speech you don't usually deliver around the coffee machine. They were translating into Japanese, their A [first] language. None of them are professional interpreters, nor do they aim at it. Some are requested from time to time to deliver interpretation - consecutive - at work. The logical, strong analytical mind has an edge in such situations.”

Incidentally, the post in question contains a neat example of the kind of notes that consecutive interpreters take and the usefulness of Chinese characters for them if you happen to know Chinese or Japanese.

Incidentally too, Lionel elsewhere refers to “the majority of untrained interpreters who practice on the planet without the credentials,” and says, “I am one of them and feel closer to a terp in a theater of war than to an AIIC member.” Well yes, so long as you understand that he rates at very least as an Advanced Native Interpreter. However, long professional experience constitutes on-the-job training and there’s no doubt he’s actually an Expert Interpreter.

Term
AIIC: International Association of Conference Interpreters. The acronym derives from its French name, Association Internationale de Interprètes de Conférence, because the organisation was founded in Paris in 1953 and the founders were French speakers.

Reference
Lionel Dersot. The logical mind. The Liaison Interpreter blog, August 23, 2011.

Wikipedia's Native Translators

In my July 2 post, I called attention to a survey that was being done by Julie McDonough Dolmaya (see photo) of York University in Toronto. It concerns translators who participate in crowdsourcing projects. More particularly, she profiles 76 translation contributors to Wikipedia. What follows is just an extract focusing on what's of particular interest for this blog here. For the full picture, which she hasn’t finished painting yet, and for important information like her sampling method, go to her blog, which you can reach quickly via the Blogging about translation and localization link on the right of this page.

First some points about Wikipedia:
¶ A great deal of Wikipedia, especially in languages other than English, has been produced by translating. In general the translations are good as regards both content and language, indeed so good that sometimes it’s hard to tell which version of an article was the original. Even without exact figures, it’s certain that Wikipedia contains, semi-obscured, a vast corpus of technical translations, and therefore studies of those translations and of the translators who did them will be important for translation studies.
¶ All of Wikipedia has been written by crowdsourcing since before the term even came into use. (If you care to go back into history, you might also say that the first edition of the great Oxford English Dictionary a century ago and before computers existed was compiled partly by crowdsourcing, but that’s another story.)
¶ Its discourse is at a level that requires an advanced education. It lies well beyond the ‘everyday circumstances’ that’s part of the definition of the Natural Translation Hypothesis.
¶ Furthermore, each article requires expert knowledge of its subject field and of the accompanying terminology.
¶ In addition, Wikipedia users are very critical readers, as you can see from the discussions that accompany the articles. If translations are inadequate, one would expect readers to criticise them. Conversely, if they’re not criticised… In either case, it’s an aspect that calls for investigation.
¶ The language of Wikipedia writings, at any rate in the languages I can read, is formal, even academic, as befits the long tradition of encyclopaedias.
¶ Wikipedia doesn’t pay its contributors.

What then do we learn from Julie’s research?

¶ “When respondents were asked about translation-related training, most (51 respondents or 68%) responded that they had no formal training in translation.”
¶ Of the other 32%, most had taken anything from “a few courses” to a full degree or certificate at a university or college, and a small minority (about 8) replied, “I received training in translation at my workplace.” We may – with some generosity in the case of those who just “took some translation courses” – class them as Expert Translators.
¶ “52 of the 76 respondents (68.4%) had never worked as translators (i.e. they had never been paid to produce translations). Only 11 respondents (or about 14%) were currently working as translators on a full- or part-time basis, while 13 (or about 17%) had worked as translators in the past but were not doing so now.” Let’s lump them all together as Professional Translators and assume – again with some generosity, especially towards the part-timers – that they’re all Experts. Furthermore, as Wikipedia doesn’t pay for translations, it’s as Expert Translators and not as Professional Translators that they’re contributing to it.
¶ “Only two respondents were members of a professional association of translators.” Experts, of course. Probably they overlap with the set that had received formal or workplace training; but not necessarily, because some associations accept members without such training. Anyway, the number is tiny.

So what can we conclude? Subject to a few caveats which Julie mentions herself, the following. That given the nature of Wikipedia texts (which rules out Natural Translators), and Julie’s figures, over two thirds of Wikipedia translators are Advanced Native Translators.

Thank you, Julie, for a pioneering initiative.

Terms
Advanced Native Translator, Natural Translator, Expert Translator, Professional Translator: for definitions of these terms and the relationship between them, enter definitions in the Search box on the right and then select the post of November 12, 2010 from the results.

References
Julie McDonough Dolmaya. Wikipedia survey I (respondent profiles). Blogging about Translation and Localization, May 30, 2011.

Julie McDonough Dolmaya. Wikipedia survey II (types of participation). Blogging about translation and localization, June 12, 2011.

Image: JoSTrans

Translation in Language Teaching

A book that’s making waves in language teaching circles is Guy Cook’s Translation in Language Teaching. Making waves? Well, last year it won the Ben Warren Prize, which is a prized awarded annually by the Ben Warren-International House Trust to an author or authors of an outstanding work in the field of language teacher education.

It’s a sign of the times. The so-called grammar-translation (GT) method was dominant in schools for centuries until World War II, when it was displaced by various applications of the ‘direct method’ (pattern drills, audiovisual learning, etc.) Cook deals with this in his historical introduction, though I don’t agree with him that the influence of private for-profit language schools such as Berlitz was determinant. I myself learnt four languages by GT and then lived through the changeover forcibly as a TESOL teacher in the 1960s. The reasoning behind the change was that (a) we learn our first languages from their use in context and not by studying grammar as such nor by translating, and (b) translating causes interference. These are valid arguments up to a point, and Cook doesn’t recommend returning to the nineteenth century. But now the realisation is dawning that translation can’t be shut out. Teachers who are teaching by the ‘direct method’ slip into using it anyway. Often it’s by far the quickest means for conveying to a student the meaning or the use of a new item in the second language. Then there’s the psychological fact that whatever the method, students are constantly translating to themselves in their own minds. Furthermore – and this is something that’s not emphasised enough – second language learning is hard work and so it needs motivation, and one strong motive for learning another language is in order to be able to translate speech and documents for oneself and for other people. The accent today is on language learning for communication, and translation is needed more and more for communication.

So translation never did die out in language teaching, but it did suffer great opprobrium. And now it seems the pendulum has started to swing. Cook’s conclusion:

“A great deal remains to be done before TILT (Translation in Language Teaching] can be rehabilitated and developed in the way that it deserves. The insidious association of TILT with dull and authoritarian Grammar Translation, combined with the insinuation that Grammar Translation had nothing good in it at all, has lodged itself so deeply in the collective consciousness of the language-teaching profession, that it is difficult to prise it out at all, and it has hardly moved for a hundred years. The result has been an arid period in the use and development of TILT, and serious detriment to language teaching as a whole.”

With all that, the most important statement in the book from our point of view is this: that translating is not only a specialist professional skill but “a major component of bilingual communicative competence.”

Bilingualism specialists please note.

References
Guy Cook. Translation in Language Teaching: an Argument for Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 2010. 202 p. Paperback £29.

Jonathan Marks. Review of Cook’s book in The Linguist, June/July 2011, p. 28.

For another proponent of translation in language teaching, Richard Vaughan, see the post about him on this blog by entering Vaughan in the Search box on the right.

Image: OUP.

Peter Newmark: Footnote

The last post recommended Peter Newmark’s article The Curse of Dogma in Translation Theory highly and gave a reference for it, but the original was published back in 1991 so it may be hard to find. Now I’ve added a reference to the more recent online reprint, but it’s very expensive to view unless you can access it through a library. So it occurs to me that I should give you at least a taste of his thinking and his style.

The article in question makes a critical tour of the schools of theory that were fashionable among academics at the time and indeed still are. I mentioned that when I last met Peter we were listening to a conference paper by a speaker who was saying that translation not merely involves culture transfer, it is culture transfer. So here’s what Peter had to say about that, the third in his round-up of theories.

“3. Translation is basically cultural substitution, or culture switching. This notion ignores the universal features of life and their correspondences in languages, as well as elements of culture that are shared in experience or through communication across boundaries. Cultures exist, but they are not the whole truth. The cultural component of language, which is prominent in forms of address, in phaticisms, in standard metaphors, is being exaggerated by linguists and translation theorists at a time when it is in fact declining, when a great world ideology is collapsing…

A dogmatic adherence to the `equivalent effect' principle [that a translation should have the same effect on the reader as the original had on its readers]… leads implicitly to the idea that translation is essentially culture substitution... Caricaturing the position, national games , dishes, drinks,recreations, fashions (say slimness or fatness) would be regarded as equivalent or intertranslatable, if they aroused equivalent emotions. Hence Shakespeare's summer's day becomes Arabic oasis or palm tree, which is nonsense. The fact is that the translator only rarely uses cultural equivalents, which are always inaccurate. More commonly, she takes advantage of cultural overlap (a rose is a rose in many cultures and languages, including some where roses are only heard or read about), or she introduces (transfers) and glosses the source language cultural word, or she adjusts communication by using the expanding, intertranslatable universal language of science and technology, which is mainly non-cultural, of international organizations (the European Commission as a promoter of literal translation).

The force of simple words like matador, which means `killer' [as well as ‘bullfighter’] is nullified when they are transferred into another language. Transferring a word often has an anodyne or obscurantist effect, where literal translation shows up the stark truth.”

On other hand, he was not dogmatic himself. He was well aware that some degree of cultural adjustment is desirable when translating to Expert standards. For example:

“[The Leipzig translation professor] Neubert notes that German academic papers differ from their English counterparts in their greater degree of degressiveness (their notorious excursuses). He does not make the recommendation which I would prefer, that is to reduce if not eliminate the digressiveness. To take another example, most German and English medical papers are superbly structured, so there should be little textual interference in translating say from the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift into the British Medical Journal or vice versa, but many French medical papers have to be restructured at the sentence, paragraph and even text level when translated.”

You don’t have to agree, but my point is – as I said last time – that he kept his feet on the ground of translation practice.

In Memoriam Peter Newmark

Peter Newmark has died.

He was a Grand Old Man of British translation studies and a very nice, helpful person. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of professional translators like me read his bi-monthly column in The Linguist religiously. There will be many tributes to him, and a memorial meeting is to be held in the autumn at Guildford, in the south of England, where he lived and – in recent years – taught. There will also be many personal reminiscences from his colleagues, friends and students.

In fact one such anecdotal tribute was published recently by a Spanish former student whom he had counselled, José Manuel Mora Fandos. He describes how Newmark’s Paragraphs on Translation delivered him from "the theoreticians who had never themselves translated anything." What José Manuel liked in Newmark’s writings about theory was what I liked. He kept his feet on the ground of translation practice and wrote in the British tradition of clear language. His attitude was well summed up in the title of one his articles: The Curse of Dogma in Translation Studies. I smile at the image of him towards the end of José Manuel’s article where he goes off to his university class by bicycle. He must have been in his eighties.

I got to know Peter in person when he spent a period as a guest lecturer in Ottawa in 1983. He did me two services around that time: he persuaded me to switch to using the excellent Collins English Dictionary, which was new then, and he introduced me to the research of Hans Krings. Krings was a pioneer in the use of the ‘think aloud’ technique in translation research. At that time his work was only available in German, in which Peter was fluent but not me.

However, the last time I met Peter in person was at a translation conference in London in December 1991, and there he did me a service of another kind that was to have far-reaching consequences for me. We were sitting together listening, as I remember, to a speaker who was of the school that says translation is a transfer between cultures rather than between languages. Peter had told me just beforehand that he thought translatology was too pompous a term for what we do in translation studies – an opinion he was to change but only much later. Afterwards, I told him that I was on a committee to select a new director for the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. I also said that we weren’t making much progress because we couldn’t agree on a candidate we liked. Then he remarked, “Well, you have done it before” – I’d been director from 1975 to 1979 – “and you were successful. Why don’t you do it again yourself?” So I went home and thought about his assessment, which carried weight, and I did in fact offer myself as director and got the job. And that’s how I ended up my career at the University of Ottawa, thanks to Peter’s encouragement.


References
José Manuel Mora Fandos. Una anécdota personal con el maestro de traductores Peter Newmark. Globedia, 25 May 2011. http://uy.globedia.com/anecdota-maestro-traductores-peter-newmark

Peter Newmark. Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, c1993. 176 p. Paperback edition available from Amazon UK.

Peter Newmark. The curse of dogma in translation studies. Lebende Sprachen, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 105-108, 1991. PDF copy available online at
http://www.reference-global.com/toc/les/36/3.

For his change of heart about translatology, see
Peter Newmark. Translation now - 60. The Linguist (Chartered Institute of Linguists, London), vol. 48, no. 6, p. 27, 2009.

Collins Dictionary of the English Language. Edited by Patrick Hanks, Thomas Hill Long, and Laurance Urdang. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1979. 1690 p. There have been several later editions.

Hans P. Krings. Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht: eine empirische Untersuchung zur Struktur des Übersetzungsprozesses an fortgeschrittenen Franzözischlernern (What goes on inside the translator’s head….). 1986. 570 p. Unfortunately it’s out of print and there’s no English translation. However, there’s another book by Krings with think-aloud data which is available:
Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigation of Machine Translation Post-Editing Processes. Translated from German by Geoffrey S. Koby. Kent State University Press, 2001. 635 p.

Image
http://eunahchoi.egloos.com

Sailors as Ad Hoc Linguists

After the last three posts about ‘terps’, I thought I would move away from warfare. But not quite yet. However, this time it’s a very different context and about a different arm of the Defense establishment, the US Navy.

The technological bent of modern warfare has led to a need for highly educated officers. Often they're encouraged to go back to university and study for higher degrees. As a by-product of this upgrading, they produce interesting research material. For example, the very first thesis I ever came across about machine translation was by a Canadian Armed Forces officer, André Gouin. It was an evaluation of an early version of the now familiar SYSTRAN (www.systranet.com), and that was in 1970.

Forty years later comes a thesis by an American naval officer that highlights the potential value of Natural and Native Translators among US Navy personnel. Not that the author, Michael F. D’Angelo, uses those terms. Instead he speaks of “Sailors who possess the native foreign language skills and cultural background,” as well, of course, as English. The Navy needs many ‘linguists’ and for various functions. There’s a good historical section where D’Angelo traces them back to diplomatic interpretation in the late 19th century for missions such as Commodore Perry’s, which opened up Japan to the West. The function, however, with which the thesis is mostly concerned is the modern one of Cryptologic Technician Interpretive (CTI). Basically the CTI is a cryptologist who works on breaking the codes of foreign navies and decoding their intercepted communications. It’s a role that first became crucial even before Pearl Harbour in connection with Japanese. CTIs are expected to translate – that’s the Interpretive in their title – and must therefore know the languages of the encoded messages. They are trained for two years, first in the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California, and then in one of the Navy’s several Language Centers of Excellence. The intensive training turns out Professional Experts, and as such they pass beyond the scope of this blog.

But there’s a problem. Because of their foreign language proficiency, CTIs are frequently and increasingly called on to “perform foreign language duties outside of their core intelligence analyst competencies, such as translator or interpreter,” One way to meet the demand might be to increase the number of CTIs. But that would be wasteful and in the end unsatisfactory for two reasons:

a) the length and expense of the CTIs’ training, and

b) the Top Secret security clearance that CTIs must hold. (We saw in the July 18 post how this requirement affected the recruitment of Army interpreters for Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Meanwhile, D’Angelo argues, there’s a large untapped resource of Sailors without the security clearance who don’t need language training because they’re native speakers of a foreign language and who furthermore possess the cultural background that goes with it. Something about the extent of the resource is known from a 2005 Navy self-assessment survey (see References). For the rest,

“This thesis investigates how to optimize resident naval foreign language and cultural diversity and proposes alternative recruitment, training, employment, and retention methods. It recommends that the Navy develop a Translator/Interpreter rating for those ineligible for security clearances, reinstitute the Warrant Officer-1 rank, and pay ad hoc linguists.”

Ad hoc linguists – ah, there’s another term for non-Expert but useful interpreters and translators.

References
Lt. Michael F. D’Angelo (United States Navy Reserve). Options for Meeting U.S. Navy Foreign Language and Cultural Expertise Requirements in the Post 9/11 Security Environment. MSc dissertation, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA, 2009. 137p. http://edocs.nps.edu/npspubs/scholarly/theses/2009/Jun/09Jun_D_Angelo.pdf.
D’Angelo is himself a Farsi CTI.

Capt. André R. Gouin (Canadian Armed Forces). French to English Machine Translation System Based Upon Digital Computer Software Programs (SYSTRAN). MSc dissertation, School of Engineering, AirForce Institute of Technology, United States Air Force, 1970. 53 p.

One-Time Self-Assessment of Foreign Language Skills. NAVADMIN 275/05, October 18, 2005. http://www.npc.navy.mil/NR/rdonlyres/0956E9A9-EE10-450A-9D27-0FC681262442/0/NAV05275.txt

Image
Evening Colors at the Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, Monterey CA, 1984.

The Go-Betweens (conclusion)

For the earlier instalments of this summary, see the two previous posts.

The middle part of Michael Griffin's chapter is devoted to another kind of interpreter: fixers. Fixers are local liaison interpreters working for journalists and other media people.

“The journalist’s ‘fixer’ was a facilitator of a different order. Like the military interpreter, he (they were all men) translated local history, personal reputation, cultural difference and situational dynamics – as well as words – into a language their employers could understand, weighing what was said for ingots of truth and shades of deceit. How he formulated those words was more sophisticated than the Q&A of military interviews or the instant translation of commands. Fixers reached beyond the restrictions of an officer’s enquiry about security, for example, to search for the angles, coincidences, character defects or human tragedies that would interest their own employer, the reporter, who − after all − was only a more specialised kind of translator, working in print or image, for an expectant, paying audience.”

Many fixers are a prime examples of Professional Translators who start out as Natural or Native Interpreters, and who quickly become advanced Native Interpreters by experience if they’re to survive, but who do not have any training or professional credentials. In fact they are even less likely to receive training than the military terps. They are native speakers of the local languages, but their second language speech, almost always English, need not be very correct, because in any case what they say will be filtered and polished professionally by their employers.

“Javed Yazamy – ‘Jojo’ to his Canadian clients – was a teenager janitor at a US Special Forces compound in 2001, who was hired as a terp when the Americans heard his refugee-camp English. He spent the next two years pursuing bin Ladin through the eastern mountains with his new friends. After the fall of the Taliban, TV networks offered him work as a fixer.”

What the fixers do need above all is contacts.

“The fixer was under constant pressure from his clients and their need for ever closer contact with actors who, while likely to spare the contractor, would nonchalantly annihilate his translator.”

On the other hand, there are fixers who are already Native Translators from their education and their background in other media activities.

“Many fixers had previously worked in aid, acquiring skills in journalism, logistics or IT and – the most crucial skill of all – social ease with westerners. Sultan Munadi, a fixer-turned-journalist for the New York Times since 2002, had begun as a press officer for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Panjshir Valley during the Taliban era and was working on a master’s degree at the time of his death.”

There have already been several posts on this blog about fixers. To find them, enter fixers in the Search box on the right. The last part of the chapter, however, introduces something that was new to me, a type of military-sponsored communication that we might call military cultural interpretation. It flourished under the impulse of two outstanding figures. One was General David Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan until a few days ago, who himself had graduated in sociology. The other was Montgomery McFate, an American woman who had won a scholarship to study anthropology at Berkeley. Having pondered, ‘How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?’ she

“won a fellowship in the Office of Naval Research in 2004 where she was asked by the 4th Infantry Division for advice on interpreting Iraqis’ cultural behaviour in the Sunni Triangle.”

The Americans were waking up to the realisation that they must win hearts as well as firefights and that they must seek to understand both their enemies and their allies.

“In 2006, McFate contributed 50 pages of analysis on the use of ‘cultural knowledge’ and ‘intelligence preparation of the battlefield’ to FM 3-24, the first manual on counter-insurgency (COIN) to be published in 20 years. As commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from 2005, General David Petraeus had overseen the manual’s composition and publication in December 2006, before taking command of US forces in Iraq“

McFate’s ideas on ‘armed social science‘, along with those of an Australian army officer, David Kilcullen, who also had a doctorate in anthropology, blossomed into the Human Terrain System (HTS), which was composed, in the field, of Human Terrain Teams. For a while it absorbed a great deal of funding and resources starting in Iraq, where Petraeus said, “‘The HTTs have evolved into important elements in our operations .” Nevertheless, HTS was regarded with suspicion not only by some of the military but also by the American Anthropological Association.

The question I ask myself is how the HTS input could be gathered without yet another kind of liaison interpreter, the native informants used by virtually all anthropologists working in the field away from home. But that’s another story.

There’s a great deal more, and many moving personal histories, in Michael Griffin’s chapter than I’ve room to summarise. I have to move on. We must just hope his book finds a publisher soon. I thank him for letting me quote from it.

Source
Michael Griffin. The go-betweens. In The Broken Road: America's War in Afghanistan, forthcoming.
Michael’s email address is michaelgriffin9@googlemail.com

Image
Ajmal Naqshbandi, a still from Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, a prizewinning documentary film by Ian Olds, 2009. See http://www.fixerdoc.com/.
Naqshbandi was killed by Taliban while he was working as fixer for an Italian journalist.