Diplomatic Interpreters

It's a rule on this blog not to digress about Professional Interpreting. However, a highly topical photo has come my way which is so outstandingly clear, instructive and symbolic that I feel I must share it with you.

A fair amount has been written about diplomatic interpreting, and much more remains to be written. For one classic that's still in print, see References below. But I must stick to this photo.

It shows British Prime Minister David Cameron in formal conversation with Chinese Communist Party official Li Changchun at 10 Downing Street last week. If you've been following the news, you know at least one hot topic that must have been on the agenda; anyway it's in the article referenced. The ladies on either side are of course the interpreters. Though they both look Chinese, the one on Cameron's side must in fact be British. We know this because it's a long-standing convention in formal diplomatic interpreting that each side brings its own interpreter, usually of its own nationality. This has advantages:

* Confidence and confidentiality: each side feels it can trust its interpreter to work in its best interest and not divulge confidential information
* Each interpreter can monitor the translation of the other interpreter and warn of any discrepancies
* The division of work between two interpreters provides some relief if the meeting is prolonged.

Each interpreter translates only when her own side is speaking, therefore the interpretation is one way. The interpreters in the photo are seated in the standard position, next to but slightly behind the speakers. There they can hear and be heard well without seeming intrusive. They are dressed formally, with a culture difference showing perhaps in the more severe style of the Chinese interpreter.

Apart from the importance of the occasion, there's something that tells us in a flash that they're Expert Interpreters: the notepads at the ready. The modus operandi is consecutive interpreting, so the interpreters take notes to aid their recall of what is said. Note-taking forms part of the training of Expert Interpreters. There's no equipment besides notepads and pens; it's a form of interpreting that's remained unaffected by technology.

An experienced interpreter at the United Nations in New York once told me he found this kind of work more interesting even than interpreting at high-profile conferences like the UN Assembly. Because in the Assembly, the heads of state or government make propaganda speeches that are often just blah-blah; but it's in tête-à-tête meetings like these that one feels the really important negotiations are taking place.

References
Adrienne Mong. China's political scandal embroils Britain. Behind the Wall, CBC News, 2012. For the article, click here.

Ruth A. Roland. Interpreters as Diplomats: A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Politics. Introduction by Jean Delisle, who had the good idea of republishing this book that had almost been forgotten. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999. There's a review of it here.

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An excellent photo by Leon Neal / AFP - Getty Images

Blogger has thrown a spanner in the works

Blogger has thrown a spanner in the works as far as I'm concerned. You probably don't see it if you're a reader, but behind the scenes they've redesigned the interface.

Their view is that they're "introducing the completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts."

My view is, why can't the software people let well alone instead of constantly forcing us users through a new learning curve? I'm very happy with my Windows XP, thank you, at least until Microsoft withdraws support in 2014. And I was very happy with the previous version of Blogger.

I'll be back when I've learnt to navigate round this "streamlined blogging experience."

The Computer Geek/Geek Computri (continued)

Continued from the previous post, which please read first.

"The Computer Geek/Geek Computri was entirely written by Magda and Albana, two 10-year-old girls of immigrant Albanian parents in London. It tells the story of Jordan, a boy obsessed with gaming on his computer, and how he becomes sucked into a dangerous adventure in a virtual world before his eventual rescue by his grandmother. The girls explained that the inspiration for the story came from films, television programmes and computer games. Having composed the story in English, their stronger language, they faced the challenge of translating it into their weaker one, as Magda explains: ‘For the English one, we have so many ideas, but this is harder!'
Having used dual language books extensively to learn to read with their mothers, the girls are familiar with their specific conventions and they have worked closely from the English text to produce the Albanian one. Working together from their own linguistic resources, without the use of dictionaries the girls have access to most of the basic vocabulary they need for their story in Albanian."

By virtue of their method of learning Albanian, the girls are therefore Native and not Natural Translators. That's to say, although they haven't had any intentional training as translators, they've learnt by osmosis some of the conventions of translating. Furthermore, they've each built up an internal bilingual lexicon.

"The process of translation is negotiated between two children whose language skills are closely matched. The main approach to the task is to take a clause at a time from the English text and discuss it, phrase by phrase, word by word. Some words lead to lengthy exchanges as they attempt to find a shade of meaning or the correct grammatical form, before a whole sentence can fall into place. As a sentence is completed, one of them repeats it as the other transcribes.
A typical example of negotiation occurs at the very beginning of the recording. Starting where the English text says, ‘While he was talking to his Grandma’, Magda starts with a word-for-word approach, taking while and translating it as nderkohë.
Albana agrees with her choice of word: 'Oh yeah, we did that in Albanian class.'
Magda then realises that this approach is not appropriate: 'We need to do the rest because it won’t make sense.'
Then she has second thoughts about the word nderkohë and they discuss options:
Magda: 'Nderkohë . . . It doesn’t make sense.'
Albana: 'What about, like this: kur ishe, cfarë? [he was, what to put?].
Magda: 'I don’t know it’s not, it’s nderkohë. While . . . while . . . I keep thinking mbasi [maybe] but it’s not.'
Magda: 'That’s after.'
Albana: 'kur ishte . . . uhm.'"
[Later,] She [Magda] goes on to explain that the great debate over the use of nderkohë revolved round a shade of meaning:
'It’s like meanwhile. But we were trying to find while. And we couldn’t think of anything, so we just kept thinking.'
Magda explains that using that word required them to change the structure of the Albanian sentence: 'We used the word nderkohë but we changed the sentence a little bit in Albanian. So it could make sense.'
In a further [metatranslational] reflection on the process of translation, Magda notes that in contrast to the long negotiation involved in translating one word:
'Just sometimes we just read like, I don’t know, a whole, if it’s like a small paragraph, we read it all and it just comes in your head, you just know it . . . . And then you just have to change it around. You know all the main things, it just comes in your head, but then you add, like, more
words and things.'
But mostly she finds longer passages more difficult: 'But then, like long ones, you just, you do it sentence by sentence, but . . . I don’t know for long ones, it’s harder.'

And so on.

It occurs to me that what we're witnessing here is think-aloud, but with a significant advantage for research over the classic think-aloud method; and the advantage is bestowed by the circumstance that this is a collaborative translation and the collaboration is between equals. Think-aloud (verbalised on-the-job introspection) has proven to be a valuable instrument for investigating translators' mental processes, but it has its drawbacks. For one thing, Ss have to be instructed to verbalise their thoughts aloud, because it's not normal for translators to do this as they work. Therefore it continually interrupts the normal thought processes. It's also subject to self-censorship in the investigated-investigator relationship. Whereas the collaborative method makes it natural to verbalise, and the collaboration between equals makes self-censorship less likely.

This paper is therefore of great interest for its story of a working friendship, for its revelations of the translating process and for its methodology.

Reference
On the pros and cons of think-aloud, see:
K. A. Ericsson and M.C. Fox. Thinking aloud is not a form of introspection but a qualitatively different methodology: Reply to Schooler (2011). Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 137, No. 2, March 2011, pp. 351-354. For an abstract, click here.

The Computer Geek / Geek Computri

An inspiring new research report has just arrived from the UK about two schoolchildren translators. It's by Raymonde Sneddon, a researcher at the University of East London and a schoolteacher with more than 30 years of experience (see photo). The full reference is below.

The first part describes the surprising status and situation of multilingualism in English schools:

"London is the most multilingual city in the world, with over 230 languages... spoken by the children in its schools... it is not uncommon for individual primary schools to have 40 different languages spoken, with secondary schools having many more. In spite of the long history of migration, the English education system is profoundly ambivalent about its pupils’ bilingualism It is only fairly recently that the language skills of young children of migrant origin have begun to be considered as a resource rather than a problem and the benefits of bilingualism recognised. The curriculum remains resolutely monolingual and monocultural and while there is some teaching of community languages in both primary and secondary schools, this is very limited and frequently held after hours. Bilingual education is not currently available in mainstream schools. Many children lose active use of the language of their families once they start school, as a result of lack of status and recognition of the language and lack of opportunity for learning it."

However, the part that concerns this blog is the case study of how two girls, Magda and Albana, born in England to Albanian immigrant parents, used translation. Their mothers wanted them to maintain a link with their families' culture by learning and using Albanian. Note that this is not a case of language brokering. The motivation was cultural, and not practical daily needs.

"Both girls spoke only Albanian when they started in the nursery, but rapidly became dominant in English, causing their parents anxiety as their use of Albanian declined. The study revealed the strategies used by the mothers and their daughters. The women taught the Albanian letter-sound correspondence and the girls decoded text carefully... They then re-read the text more fluently for understanding, asking and answering questions and negotiating meanings with their mothers (whose knowledge of English was still developing). They used the English text to verify meanings. Their knowledge of the whole context of the story, as well as the illustrations, helped them to understand when a word was unfamiliar in both languages. They retold the stories in their own words in both languages."

At this early stage, therefore, the girls were already translating by 'aligning' two texts mentally and retelling the stories in both languages.

Thus the girls' main tool for language learning was dual language books. These are children's books that present the material aligned in two languages, typically on facing pages. There's nothing new in this format of course; what's new is the application to children's needs and so-called heritage languages, especially in the UK.

A further important development was to turn the children from readers into writers by getting them to compose dual language books themselves by means of translating.

"For students who are fairly fluent in their heritage language, Cummins [Jim Cummins, an authority on bilingual education] specifically recommends the, ‘creation of student-authored dual language books by means of translation from the initial language of writing to L2’ (Cummins 1999, 589). Such a strategy offers pupils an opportunity to explore and analyse the similarities and differences between their languages; working with different syntactic structures and the very different range of meanings that equivalent words have in different languages can develop metalinguistic skills and critical literacy. Students involved in such activities have reported the benefit to their English language skills, and this is very much what has been noted regarding the children in the present study using translation to teach themselves to write in Albanian."

Actually Albana and Magda went through an intermediate stage in which they composed bilingual holiday diaries. But

"By the time they were in Year 5, aged 10, Magda and Albana were keen to follow the success of their holiday books by writing together a work of fiction. Their teacher provided time for them to work collaboratively. This provided me, as the researcher, with an opportunity to follow their progress."

The "work of fiction" turned out to be a story called The Computer Geek / Geek computri.

To be continued.

Footnote
Dual language books for children are by no means only to be found in the UK. Here in Valencia there's a trilingual series in Valencian, Spanish and Arabic, beautifully illustrated (see References). Why Arabic? Doubtless for the many North African immigrants in the Valencia region.

References
Raymonde Sneddon. Telling the story of the Computer Geek: children becoming authors and translators. Language and Education, pp. 1-16, 2012. My thanks to the author for so promptly providing me with a full copy. To link to an abstract, click here.

Jim Cummins. Biliteracy, empowerment, and transformative pedagogy. In J. V. Tinajero and R. A. DeVillar (eds.), The Power of Two Languages: 2000, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1999, pp. 9–19. Click here for the text.

Anna Molins. Joha i l'home de la ciutat / juhaa warajul al-madiynah / Yoha y el hombre de la ciudad. (Minaret series, 2.) Arabic translation by Tànit Assaf Muntané. Illustrated by Lluïsa Jover. Valencia: Tandem, 2005. There are several others in the series.

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Source: University of Waikato

Games Translators Play

Back in November, 2010, there was a post on this blog about Juvenes Translatores, a pan-European translation competition for young people, 17 years old, who are still at secondary school. For more about the make-up of the competition, enter juvenes in the Search box on the right. Now the results of the 2011 edition are out.

"The contest has gained in popularity each year, with entrant numbers last year the highest ever at over 3,000."

So it's very popular and not just for prodigies.

"Many of this year’s winners have a special fondness for languages. The winners from the Netherlands and Luxembourg grew up in bilingual families, and have added more at school."

In this respect, see the remarks two and three posts ago about multilingualism.

The competition is impressive too for its variety.

"Participants had to select one of 23 texts (for each of the EU’s official languages) and translate it into another EU language of their choice. Although many chose English as a source language, the total number of language combinations used was 148 – the highest since the competition was launched in 2007."
"Irish girl Orla Patton, a student at Mainistir Loreto Deilginis school in County Dublin, is the winner of the Irish section of the contest for her work – translating a text from Irish into English."

The competitors in Juvenes Traductores are neither Expert nor Professional Translators, but the competition is judged by professionals from the European Commission, so we can assume that the best of them achieve near-expert standards. In fact, by the nature of the language courses in the schools they attend, they are Advanced Native Translators.

"The competition organisers were at pains to stress that behind every promising student there is a teacher. Success in the competition is not simply a matter of arranging the practical details, they said – the winners’ teachers had clearly also put in some hard yards, inspiring and nurturing such linguistic interest and flair."

At the same time, news comes about another well-established but very different competition, the Jeux de la Traduction / Translation Games. This year, its seventh, it will be held at Sherbrooke, Quebec. It's a team competition; the languages are limited to French and English. And it's for professionals, or aspiring professionals like translation school students. (Significantly, one of its sponsors is the Language Industry Association of Canada.) As such it's of no further interest for this blog, except that, like Juvenes Translatores, it illuminates the ludic aspect of translating: translation as play, without having a communicative purpose. As Werner Leopold, a pioneer of child language studies, discovered long ago with his little Natural Translator daughter, translating can be fun. (For more about Leopold's daughter. enter leopold in the Search box)


References
Alan McDonnell. Europe’s best young translators feted in Brussels: Dublin girl shines in native language skills. The Epoch Times, March 28, 2010. For the article, click here.

7es Jeux de la traduction / 7th Translation Games. Université de Sherbrooke, 2012. Website here.

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European Commission

Can Translation Be Called Interpretation?

Back in October 2009, there was a post on this blog with the title Can interpretation be called translation? To find it, enter jd-glasgow in the Search box on the right – you’ll see why. It was about an ambiguity in the word translation, which means 'written translation' in a narrow sense but 'any kind of translation, written or oral', in the broad sense understood by the general public. Certainly the technical usage is to call the oral kind interpretation.

Now, all of a sudden, the reverse question arises of whether interpretation can be used to include written translation.

Historically, the answer is yes. The Latin word interpres, which is the origin of interpreter, meant any kind of translator. That’s why Louis Kelly’s history of translation is called The True Interpreter. In modern German, Dolmetscher means interpreter, but when Martin Luther, in 1530, penned his famous Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, he was addressing the translators of written texts, more especially the Bible. Later on, the diplomatic ‘interpreters’ in the consulates of European powers in the Middle and Far East did both written and oral translation. But how about today?

Believe it or not, the greatest legal minds in the United States are currently pondering this 'terminological inexactitude', and the transcript of the proceedings so far runs to 63 pages.

“Consider the facts. In 2008, Mr. Taniguchi [a Japanese citizen] filed suit against a hotel in Saipan [a US territory in the Pacific], accusing it of negligence after he fell through a wooden deck on the premises in 2006. The hotel won and, following a provision in U.S. federal law that says the winner can recoup “interpretation” costs, sent Mr. Taniguchi a bill for $5,517.20, according to court records. Of that amount, $5,257.20 was actually for document translations including some of Mr. Taniguchi’s medical records from Japan.
Mr. Taniguchi’s lawyers objected, saying the word 'interpretation' doesn’t include translation of written material. They lost in a federal appeals court in San Francisco and brought their case to the Supreme Court.
The high court accepts less than 1% of appeals – so why this one? Credit probably goes to Judge Richard Posner in Chicago, one of the nation’s best-known appellate judges, who in 2006 ruled that translations don’t count as interpretations. 'Robert Fagles made famous translations into English of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but no one would refer to him as an English-language ‘interpreter’ of those works,' averred Judge Posner.
There was thus a split among appeals courts – with the San Francisco court, joined by others, taking one interpretation of 'interpretation' and Judge Posner taking another. Such splits can only be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court."

Don't hold your breath. The Justices are not expected to deliver their decision until July. Meanwhile it's not a cut-and-dried case.

"Justice Scalia drew laughter when he offered a suggestion to explain why lower courts have sometimes allowed the billing of translation costs [as interpretation]. 'Stupidity, madam, sheer stupidity,' Justice Scalia said, quoting 18th-century author Samuel Johnson."

References
My thanks to Guillermo Marco of Intérpretes de Conferencias, S.L., Valencia, for contributing the Wall Street Journal items.

Lost in Interpretation: Japan Citizen Case Goes to Supreme Court. Japan Real Time, Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2012. For the article, click here.

Matter of Interpretation: Supreme Court Sympathetic to Japanese Litigant. Japan Real Time, Wall Steet Journal, February 22, 2012. For the article, click here.

For the verbatim transcript of the Supreme Court hearing, click here.

Louis G. Kelly. The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Available from Amazon UK.

Martin Luther. Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen. In H. J. Störig (ed.) Das Problem des Übersetzens, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963, pp.14-32. For an English translation, click here.

Brian Harris. Ernest Satow's Early Career as Diplomatic Interpreter. Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 116-134, 2002.
Satow was a British diplomatic interpreter in Japan whose work involved a good deal of written translation.

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The United States Supreme Court. Source: Wall Street Journal.

Multilingualism (continued)

The previous post made an anecdotal case for multilingualism being within the capability of ordinary people. Hyperglots are people who are endowed with or who've exploited that common capability to an uncommon extent. (For a video of an Italian polyglot, Luca, who speaks eight languages, click here and skip the opening ad.) We're all born with the ability to learn not just one language, not even two, but an unknown multiplicity of languages if we want to.

Why so and how? Wouldn't one language have been enough for the minds of individuals? (Societal multilingualism is another matter.) But nature abounds in redundancies. Perhaps they've evolved to provide backup if one ability fails. If we go blind and can't read or write, we can dictate and – these days – listen to audio descriptions; and if sight and sound both fail, there's still communication by touch.

How do we deal with many languages? Not only learn them but also store and recall them and use them properly? The model in favour is that languages are coded as networks of neurons; but there's disagreement over whether a new network forms for each language, or a single network is augmented and the new language 'tagged' for activation and suppression. Either way, our brains come provided with so many billions of neurons that there are plenty for another language and in practice there's no physical limit. Studies of interaction between the languages tend to focus on the leakage or interference between them; but the interferences are relatively minor compared with the vast amount of language that we successfully differentiate and use separately; that's another miracle.

Of course there's the flip side: the billions of people who don't know more than one language. But it's not because they can't, though they often come to think they can't. The most prevalent reason is that they don't need it because they live out their lives in one sufficient community with one dominant language. There's also cultural superiority: the pretension that other people should learn your language and not you theirs; common among native English speakers, including English Canadians.

As for translation, logically the Natural Translation Hypothesis would predict that multilinguals and hyperglots can translate between all possible pairings of their languages. Somebody test it, please! That doesn't mean they can translate equally well or with equal facility in all the combinations; because their translating ability is limited by the extent of their knowledge of the languages and by other cognitive factors. But NTH says they can always do some translating.

Meanwhile, two languages are a sufficient minimum for translating, so it's understandable that most studies of individual translators, including interpreters, have looked at them as bilinguals when many of them were in fact multilingual. At the Expert level, you have a hard time getting a translation position in the European Commission or the United Nations unless you know three or four languages.

Bilingualism studies of individuals have also concentrated on what the bi in the name implies: two languages. This gives the impression that multilingualism is an extension of bilingualism and that it's less normal. But from the point of view of human mental capacity and structuring, multilingualism is not an extension of bilingualism. Rather, bilingualism is a special, minimal case of multilingualism.

References
Michel Paradis. A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006. There's a paperback edition.
This is for the different hypotheses regarding language acquisition, storage and organisation, especially Paradis' own. Much of it is accessible here and here.

Audio description. Wikipedia. Click here.

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Source: YouTube.