Missionaries and Alphabets

Cree Syllabics

A year ago, this blog welcomed the inclusion of a panel on Religious Translation (Panel No. 19) in the next conference of the European Society for Translation Studies, to be held at Germersheim in Germany. (To find the post, enter wake-up in the Search box on the right. There's an interesting comment with it from a reader.) The reason for my enthusiasm was expressed thus in the programme of the panel itself:

Sacred text translation and Translation Studies share a common lineage in the work of Nida... and sacred text translation has historically fed into theories at the centre of Translation and Interpreting studies..., but most other activities included in Translation and Interpreting in Religious Settings (henceforth TIRS), find themselves on the periphery of the field. While Interpreting Studies has been expanding into the examination of interpreting in community settings since the 1980s, interpreting in religious settings has received little attention.

In other words, academia had been ignoring the importance of religious translation.

Well, time flies and the conference will actually be taking place at the end of this week and it includes a paper by a regular reader of this blog, Andrew Owen (see References). I'm in no way involved in it; nevertheless, long affinity encourages me to make a 'fringe' contribution – something that being master of my own blog makes possible at short notice.

Most religious translators (including interpreters) are non-professional Native or Expert Translators. The difficulty of understanding the texts and speeches rules out pure Natural Translators, but religious translators are familiar with the translations already made for their own sects and churches, including the Bible, and those educate them as Native Translators.

The primordial purpose of religious translation, its raison d'être, is to spread and reinforce a religion. But in so doing, it's also greatly helped the diffusion of cultures and of languages. The spread of Islam, for example, promoted the use of Arabic for literary, philosophical and medical texts as well as for the Qur'an, and many of the Islamic texts were themselves translations from Greek, Persian, etc., part of a translation chain.

My contribution is intended to point to a less obvious but scarcely less important effect: the invention and spread of alphabets and other writing systems.

I first became conscious of it when visiting Bulgaria in the 1970s. I happened to be there on Saints Cyril and Methodius Day, a national holiday. These saints, who were brothers, were ninth-century missionaries and translators from Byzantium, "Apostles to the Slavs." They translated into languages that lacked a writing system, and so they had to invent one. They devised the so-called Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet used to transcribe Old Church Slavonic. Glagolitic was derived from Greek, but augmented by ligatures and consonants for sounds not found in Greek. During the following century, Glagolitic was developed in the then-powerful Bulgarian Empire into what we now know as the Cyrillic or 'Russian' alphabet. And that's how Cyrillic got its name.

In Canada we have our own history of missionaries and writing systems. A famous example is the Cree syllabary (writing in which each character represents a whole syllable).

Cree syllabics were developed by James Evans, a missionary in what is now Manitoba, during the 1830s for the Ojibwe language. Evans had originally adapted the Latin script to Ojibwe,... but after learning of the success of the Cherokee syllabary [in the United States], he experimented with invented scripts based on his familiarity with shorthand and Devanagari. When Evans later worked with the closely related Cree, and ran into trouble with the Latin alphabet, he turned to his Ojibwe project and in 1840 adapted it to the Cree language. The result contained just nine glyph shapes, each of which stood for a syllable with the vowels determined by the orientations of these shapes. With the 1841 publication of a syllabics hymnbook, the new script spread quickly. The Cree valued it because it could be learned in just a few hours, and was visually distinctive from the Latin script of the colonial languages. Virtually all Cree became literate in the new syllabary within a few years. Evans taught by writing on birchbark with soot, and he became known as "the man who made birchbark talk."

All this was brought back to mind by an article that appeared last year in Translatio. (Translatio is the junior partner of Babel and has the same indefatigable editor-in-chief, René Haeseryn.) It's by S. O. Kolawole and Salawu Adewuno of Ado Ekiti University in Nigeria (see References).

The first language of instruction in Hausaland was Arabic. But the Hausa language was established [as its competitor] by Christian missionaries after working hard to fix the Hausa orthography, vocabulary and grammar using the Roman alphabet. These scholarly works prompted translation activities in the northern parts of Nigeria, thereby opening the Hausa-Fulani peoples to a Western conception of life. The Bible, the Qur'an and several other religious books were translated.

The difference in this case was that no new alphabet was invented. Instead an often used alternative route was taken: the adaptation of the Latin aka Roman alphabet to a quite alien language. Either way, the result is that a language is given its writing system by missionaries.

No writing system, no written texts. No written texts, no written translation. In a way, religious faith apart, these writing systems were the missionaries' most fundamental bequest.

References

• Jonathan Downie, and Jill Karlik. Panel 19: Translating and interpreting in religious settings. Programme of the 7th EST Congress, Germersheim, 2013. The full programme with abstracts is here. 
• Andrew Owen. Interpreting the public reading of Scripture. Paper to the 7th EST Congress, Germersheim, 2013. The abstract is here, on page 50. 
• Saints Cyril and Methodius. Wikipedia. Click here.
• Cyrillic script. Wikipedia. Click here.
• Cree syllabics. Wikipedia. Click here.
• S. O. Kulawole and Salawu Adewuno. Translation activities in Hausaland: a historical perspective. Translatio 31(2012);3.127-140.

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Source: Norway House Indian Residential School — The Children Remembered. www.thechildrenremembered.ca

Behind Bars

Aida Martínez-Gómez

 Although Aida Martínez-Gómez lives quite close to me at Alicante, a mere 170 km away, I've only recently become aware of her research. She's one of the new generation of Spanish translatologists who got their PhDs since the 90s, when translation studies really took off in Spain. Now those graduates have spread to other countries, and so Aida also teaches at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Her interest is in interpreters – interpreters in an unusual environment, namely prisons. She isn't the only researcher in this area; there's also Linda Rossato of the University of Bologna, who gave a paper at last year's Forli conference (see References). But it's a very special interest.

There are particular difficulties in collecting data in this area; for which reason, Linda says, "academia has tended to miss out on this productive field of research." First it's necessary to get permission to enter the prisons and meet the prisoners. Linda did it by giving Italian lessons. Aida laments that though she was able to make audio recordings, she was not allowed to make the videos she would have needed for studying body language.

So who needs interpreters? In both Italy and Spain, almost half the prison population is of foreign extraction, first or second generation. But this is a poor indication of language needs. In the case of Spain,

• Many prisoners have learnt Spanish before or during incarceration
• Many more knew Spanish anyway before they came here, because they're from Spanish-speaking Latin American or African countries.

Therefore only a minority needs help. Nevertheless, the need exists.

Today's videoconferencing technology would in theory allow the use of Professional Expert Interpreters in prison without the interpreter being physically located there. This is in fact what happens in a few jurisdictions, for example in the UK, where it's been analysed and criticised by Yvonne Fowler (see References). But it's still exceptional and for special occasions, considered expensive and not for daily life behind bars.

"The general reality of European Union penitentiaries as regards treatment of foreign inmates is one of difficulties that arise because of language barriers. These barriers leave them disadvantaged, as compared to the natives, in access to medical care and legal assistance, work training and even some of the games and recreational activities. To solve the problem so far as possible, there is reliance on help from fellow prisoners, and to a lesser extent on prison staff, who provide ad hoc interpreting services on a voluntary and altruistic basis."

And so we are back to Natural and Native Translators, and on an institutional scale. Linda sees it as a form of adult Language Brokering. Only in the UK, it seems, has the contribution of 'trusty' prisoner interpreters been officially recognised by the grade of Foreign National Prisoner Orderlies and some training given to them. But then the Brits also have a Foreign National Prisoners’ Resource Pack, "which is remarkable not only for its full content and the range of languages in which it is provided but also for including information directed to prison staff."

The situation in Spain is much as in the other EU countries. Except that in 2004 the Interior Ministry awoke to the dangers of Islamic terrorism and engaged 30 professional Arabic translators to deal with the communications of the many Moroccan and Algerian inmates. However, it was decreed that "the translators are not allowed into the interior of the institutions," so it hardly changes the life of the prisoners. And in general it looks as if this is an area that will rely for a long time to come on Natural and Native Translators.

References

• Aída Martínez-Gómez Gómez. La integración lingüística en las instituciones penitenciarias españolas y europeas. (Linguistic integration in Spanish and European Penitentiaries). In Luis González and Pollux Hernúñez, eds., El español, lengua de traducción para la cooperación y el dialogo, Proceedings of the 4th El español, lengua de traducción Conference , Toledo, 2008, 485-500. The PDF version is here.
• Linda Rossato. Inmates mediating between languages and cultures. Paper to 1st International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, University of Bologna at Forli, 2012. To be published in the proceedings, 2014.
• Yvonne Fowler. Interpreting into the ether: interpreting for prison/court video link hearings. Paper to the Critical Link 5 conference, Aston University, UK, 2012. In Sandra Beatriz Hale et al., eds., The Critical Link 5: Quality in interpreting – a shared responsibility, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2009. There's a PDF version at http://criticallink.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CL5Fowler.pdf.

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Aida Martínez Gómez Gómez. Source: XING 

There may be errors in this post because Blogger isn't functioning properly at present.

Taking Stock

Some other work I’m engaged on has obliged me to step back and look at how this blog is doing. Here’s what I’ve found.

It began sporadically in February 2009, and has been published regularly at approximately weekly intervals since July of that year. At the time of this writing, it contains 282 posts. At a conservative estimate the posts average 700 words in length, which would make a total of nearly 200,000 words or 750 printed pages or 35 typical journal articles. Much of this, it’s true, is made up of quotations from other documents; nevertheless the blog constitutes a substantial source of original information. All the original material has been written by one sole author, me. References for the quoted material are given at the end of each post, and direct hyperlinks have been provided since 2011 from most of the references to the full original sources. Almost all the posts are accompanied by an appropriate image.

The blog is hosted on Google’s Blogger platform (www.blogger.com), which has proven to be a sufficiently robust and user-friendly application for the purpose. Blogger is physically located in the Google ‘cloud’, which makes it possible to compose, manage and archive the blog, despite its size, from a small, inexpensive ‘netbook’ computer, an Asus Eee PC 1005HA. (Despite its minuteness and low price, it’s the best laptop I’ve owned in 30 years.)

The declared topics are Natural Translation, Native Translation and Language Brokering. These terms, along with the complementary terms Expert Translation and Professional Translation, are defined in posts within the blog itself. While most of the posts remain focused on the declared topics, there are many, perhaps a quarter, which are not, though they have some connection with translating. Examples of the latter are the posts on fictional translators (e.g. Mr Melas in Conan Doyle’s 'The Greek Interpreter') and the annual ‘Christmas Diversions’, which trace the migration of familiar stories from their first translations into English to their popular cultural adaptations on the British stage (Aladdin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker).

The blog format was decided on for both personal and professional reasons. There's a literature now about the pros and cons of blog publication from an academic viewpoint. To find it, google blog scientific publication. Some of the criticism of conventional publication can be found on what is itself a blog, The Future of Scientific Publication (see References). The main disadvantages of conventional publication are:

• The paucity of specialized reviewers who are competent in the designated areas of research. Of the many experts on translation theory, for example, few know anything about translation by children.
• The time taken by the review and publication process, typically one to two years from submission of a paper or presentation at a conference to its appearance in print. A blogger, on the contrary, can publish a post as soon as it’s ready for reading: wake up with a bright idea in the morning, make it known to the world for evaluation and suggestions by evening.

Time is crucial for the present author, who has reached an advanced age at which his survival for another two years is statistically somewhat doubtful even in Spain, whose population enjoys exceptional longevity. In addition, he’s long since passed the stage at which he needs to further his career by publications that will be credited by university or fund-granting committees. He’s therefore completely free to choose how to publish.

In any case, the ‘learned’ publications are addressed to very elite, restricted readerships, and indeed many of them, including doctoral dissertations, are little read at all. They may be expensive to acquire. Whereas blogs are open, free, and usually written in an easily understood style. In short, insofar as they are science they are popular science. This is important for translatology, because the widespread complaint that the general public does not appreciate translating and translators at their true worth is partly due to the lack of suitable writings. (An exception that breaks the academic mould is the recent book Found in Translation by Kelly and Zetzsche.)

On the other hand, let’s admit that blog publication has serious drawbacks. The worst is that blogs are not taken seriously by the academic community, which is still stuck in an earlier model.

The essential drawbacks of the current system of scientific publishing are all connected to the particular way that peer review is used to evaluate papers. In particular, the current system suffers from a lack of quality and transparency of the peer review process, a lack of availability of evaluative information about papers to the public, and excessive costs incurred by a system, in which private publishers are the administrators of peer review. These problems can all be addressed by open post-publication peer review (OPR). Together with open access (OA), which is generally accepted as desirable, OPR will revolutionize scientific publishing.

Another is assessing the readership. There have been over 143,000 Unprofessional Translation 'pageviews', where a 'page' is roughly equivalent to a post. It currently has 164 ‘Followers’, i.e. people who have registered as regular readers. Of course this doesn’t mean that that they all read every post. On the other hand, many of the Comments, and of the emails that the blog’s author receives directly, come from people who are not Followers. For some of the Followers, profiles are available, but it's not clear from most of the profiles whether they have a serious interest in the topics of the blog. The posts that have received the most attention from commenters are not those I would have wished. For example, the posts on the meetings between Hitler, Franco and Pétain in 1940, where the interpreters were in fact Professional Experts. The Comments also attract undesirables, particularly the people who use them as a pretext for advertising their own translation services.

Finally, there is the internal organization of this particular blog and of blogs in general. The order of the posts is strictly chronological. This makes it complicated to locate and follow threads about a particular topic. Users cannot be expected to trace them themselves through the 280 posts. Fortunately there are some aids built into Blogger. Labels and tags can be added to posts and posts can be grouped by them. There is also the Search box on the right-hand side of each page, which enables more specific searching by keywords. Nonetheless, those search tools throw the onus back on readers to assemble the posts meaningfully themselves, and for that they need quite expert knowledge of the tags and keywords used.

The work I’m doing is intended to put better order into some of the posts.

References

• Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World. Foreword by David Crystal. New York: Penguin-Perigree, 2012. There was a review of it on this blog: enter zetzsche in the Search box.
• Nikolaus Kriegeskorte. An emerging consensus for open evaluation: 18 visions for the future of scientific publishing. The Future of Scientific Publication: ideas for an open, transparent, independent system, October 29, 2012. The post is here.

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Source: Mr. P's Teacher Blog

Young Interpreters in Jordan

ICS Students' Calendar

The latest issue of the Young Interpreters Newsletter has arrived from the Hampshire Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Service (EMTAS). Besides the usual enthusiastic news of the movement's progress in many schools in multilingual Britain, there's an item that stands apart. It's the one about the International Community School (ICS) in Amman, Jordan. News about Jordan always interests me particularly, because I taught there for a while and I'm eternally grateful to the late Muhammad Hasan Ibrahim, able and warm-hearted head of the translation programme at the University of Jordan, for inviting me.

Jordan is a very enjoyable country for two principal reasons:

• The friendliness of native Jordanians, who take great pride in their hospitality. I cherish memories of my colleagues, some of them Expert Translators, like Henry Jibran Matar, a displaced headmaster from a secondary school in Bethlehem who had become a translator for the Royal Jordanian Scientific Society; and of my students, all Native Translators and most of them teachers or travel agents (it was a graduate programme).
• Its richness in archeological and historical sites, the star of them being Petra, "A rose-red city half as old as time." Go and see it before it's completely buried again – under tourists. When I visited it in the 80s there were still Bedouin living among the ruins and only two hotels for visitors. Today the Bedouin have been relocated and there are more than 40 hotels.

Now to get to the point...

Amman is a great city for expatriates and their families. While expatriate can mean any person living outside their native country, a restricted meaning is 'a person living and working more or less temporarily in a foreign country.' Such people, along with their children, are an important source of bilinguals. Many of them survive inside a bubble of their own nationality, but many others learn the local languages assiduously for work or for socialising. When there are enough of them concentrated in a city, they usually open schools for their children so that the latter can be educated in an amalgam of the education systems in their own countries and those of the host countries, including of course the languages. There are several such schools in Amman and ICS is one of them. It was founded in the 50s for children of British military personnel stationed there, but it’s changed with the times. Today it’s a cosmopolitan melting pot providing British style education from Nursery to Year 13. It has 600 pupils who represent almost 50 different nationalities and speak over 15 languages.

It usually happens with such schools that they also attract the local elite to send their children there. (The schools tend to be expensive.) This is partly because of the quality of the education and partly for the snob value of association with equally elite foreigners. But whatever the motivation, the children's cultures rub off on one another and they pick up at least a smattering of each other's languages. In the case of ICS, though, languages are taken seriously: "A choice of Additional English, Arabic or French is introduced as part of the curriculum from Year 1 onwards."

What better place to start motivating and training interpreters while they are still young? So ICS has joined up as an Arab world outpost of the Young Interpreter movement inspired and organised by EMTAS in culturally far away England. (For earlier posts about the movement, enter young interpreters in the Search box on the right.) This year's report says,

"We successfully trained 9 interpreters. These pupils have embraced the scheme wholeheartedly and have been extremely helpful in our ventures. They have helped host EAL parent coffee mornings, translated for teachers and pupils, been involved in a leaflet for our infant transition, helped at our new parents evening and are truly responsible young people of whom we are very proud. Sadly our year 6 pupils are moving on and we have therefore trained up next year’s group, with our current interpreters helping at the training sessions."

As their coordinator comments, "Developing the Young Interpreter Scheme is a great way to celebrate our children's diversity and the variety of languages they speak, as well as to strengthen our school's inclusive nature." Once again we see how translating isn't only a product of education; it aids education.

  

References

• International Comunity School, Amman. Wikipedia, click here.
• Astrid Gouwy and Liz Perry (eds.). Young Interpreter Newsletter 10. Basingstoke, UK: Hampshire Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Service (EMTAS), July 2013. For information and regular updates: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/education/ema/ema-schools/ema-good-practice/ema-hyis.htm.
• The line "Rose-red city..." comes from John Burgon's poem Petra, 1845. Although Petra had been rediscovered for Westerners by Burckhardt in 1821, Burgon never actually saw it.

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Petra. Source: ICS

Sight Interpreting





An alternative model



 
Theory models always simplify. They do this so that we can see the wood for the trees, but in so doing they discard important details and nuances. So the model that is illustrated strikingly by the image at the head of the preceding post is an over-generalisation. Most obviously, it shows the interpreter listening on one side and speaking on the other, which totally ignores sign language. Hence the alternative, equally over-simplified model shown above. For the moment, however, let's focus on some less-known variants in the media employed.

First, written input instead of voice input. This affects interpreters at all levels, from Expert to Natural (once they can read of course). I've told elsewhere the story of how one of my earliest encounters with Natural Translation was overhearing a young girl in a post office in Ottawa interpreting an English official form into Portuguese for her father. This hybrid of written translating and interpreting has a traditional name, sight translation, and it's a common exercise in translator training schools. It's good practice these days for dictating translations, whether to a secretary or to a computer. At a more advanced level, Expert Court Interpreters, for example, are often handed documents in court and required to give a verbal translation of them on the spot. What's less apparent is that there's a good deal of sight translation in conference interpreting. It happens because many speakers are in fact reading aloud from a prepared text and make a copy of it available to the interpreters, sometimes in advance. If the paper is very technical or the presenter has poor elocution or the acoustics are bad, it may be easier to interpret from the written text than by listening.

An extreme case of 'sight translation' in conference interpreting is when the speaker provides a prepared translation and the interpreter just has to read it out. In Canada, ministers' speeches are usually translated in advance for fast distribution to the press, etc. When a minister was scheduled for a meeting where I was to interpret, I used to hang around the entrance to the venue to catch his or her entourage as they entered, and – if I was lucky – grab a copy of the prepared official translation from one the aides.

It happens too at the United Nations occasionally, due to a curious provision in the rules for the General Assembly. Whereas speakers must normally address the UN in one of its official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian or Spanish), there's an exception whereby heads of state may address the General Assembly in their own language whatever it may be. But there's also a proviso: if the head of state chooses a non-official language, then his or her delegation must provide the UN interpreters with a prepared translation into one of the official languages. (Muammar Gaddafi once threw the UN Arabic interpreters into a loop by speaking in Arabic, but in his own Libyan dialect instead of the Standard Arabic normally spoken at conferences and without providing a translation. See References.)

Then there is yet another mode of input, known in some professional circles as sight interpreting and not to be confused with sight translation (though if you google sight interpreting vs sight translation you'll see that many people are in fact confused). In this mode the interpreter both listens to the speaker and reads from the printed text at the same time. A reminder of it came in a remark in a recent email I received from Andrew Owen, a veteran sign-language church interpreter (see References):

My particular interest is in visually interpreting the public reading of Scripture, because there is no sign language Bible to read from (a Spanish interpreter can pick up her Spanish Bible and read).

Why listen while reading? For one thing, to keep in step with the speaker and not have the interpreter race ahead, which would be disconcerting for the audience. In any case, sight interpreting is difficult, because it requires attention to two input channels as well as a third output channel. It's not for Natural Interpreters, and as Andrew says, "most church interpreters are unprofessional." Even in Expert Conference Interpreting, if there are two interpreters in the booth then the one not currently interpreting should keep an ear on the one who is and another ear on the speaker in order to give the working colleague a nudge in the event that the latter gets out of step.

At the UN, the written translation provided for speakers in a non-official language is read out by a regular UN interpreter. But the UN interpreter can't understand and follow the speaker, so who's to keep speaker and interpreter in step? That task is performed by someone who does understand the speaker's language, usually a member of his or her delegation, and does so by pointing to the segment of the translation that corresponds to what the speaker is saying at the moment. For which reason, the person is known jokingly as the finger man.

References

• Mail Foreign Service. 'I just can't take it any more'... Gaddafi's translator 'collapsed with exhaustion' during his UN rant. Mail Online, 25 September 2009 . Read more here.
• The description of the United Nations exception for heads of state and of the finger man was given to my students by Remco Kraft, an interpreter trainer, when I visited the UN in New York with them in 1987, and no doubt represents actual practice. It differs from the UN regulations cited in the Wikipedia article 'Official languages of the United Nations', but only slightly.
• Andrew Owen will be giving a paper entitled Interpreting the public reading of Scripture at the European Society for Translation Studies conference in Germersheim, Germany, Panel 19 (Translation and Interpreting in religious settings), on August 29 or 30. The conference programme is here.

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Source: The Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., Sign Language Interpreter Deaf Ministry

Interpreter Stress

Last week an old friend coaxed me out of retirement to give a couple of classes to his conference interpreting students. (They're in a Master in Conference Interpretation programme at a private Spanish university, the Universidad Europea.) A lively bunch, they got around to discussing with me the differences between interpreting and written translation.

The first thing they all mentioned was of course the medium: voice. (We didn't touch on sign language.) Cultivating a clear voice – and for simultaneous, especially a pleasant microphone voice – is important for Professional Interpreters but people don’t expect it of Natural Interpreters. So it’s beyond the scope of this blog, except to mention that there’s an article full of good advice about it by an experienced voice coach in the latest issue of The Linguist (see References).

The next thing on which there was general agreement was stress. This surprised me a little, coming from such young and untried interpreters, but it’s been a topic of discussion among Professional Interpreters for a long time. The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) commissioned a Workload Study on interpreter stress and burnout which was completed in 2001 (see References):

“Undeniably interpreters face unrelenting stress. What form does it take? Should we consider it friend or foe? Can we control it; even make an ally of it?
"The data placed simultaneous interpretation in the category of high stress professions and... the data points to psychological and physiological costs. The factors most frequently mentioned as stressful by those participating in the study are difficulties to do with text and delivery (speed, read texts, strong accents, lack of background material and preparation time) and booth discomfort."

I would rank the causes of psychological stress as follows.

First speed. The Expert Written Translator may average 2,500 words a working day, which would be equivalent to about 400 words an hour. Any interpreter is expected to translate at a normal speaking rate of, say, 100 words per minute. It's amazing that translating can be done at this speed even by untrained interpreters, though they're allowed to ask a speaker to go more slowly.

Concentration. The interpreter listens to the speaker, but is no ordinary listener. The ordinary listener can skip what is difficult to understand, can afford at least a moment of inattention. The Expert Interpreter can't afford to miss anything. The Natural Interpreter has the luxury of at least being able to interrupt the speaker in order to do short consecutive; the Expert Interpreter must keep going. The mental effort required explains why conference interpreters, if they work to rule, change over every half hour or so. Longer stretches are possible but exhausting (though I've known conference interpreters go on alone for a whole day and court interpreters often have to do so).

Restricted resources. The written translator has a wealth of reference material to draw on, and even more so in this era of the internet. Although an occasional glance a dictionary or a scribbled note from a colleague may sometimes be possible, and Natural Interpreters have the possibility of asking speakers for clarification and even assistance, for 99% of the time the Expert Interpreters must rely on what's inside their own heads.

No opportunity for correction.The first version is the final version. Expert Written Translators can, indeed should, review their drafts and improve them, removing perceived errors. They can thereby reach a level of expression that is beyond the reach of Expert Interpreters, whose first thoughts are also their last. Natural Interpreters and sometimes Liaison Interpreters have more scope for "I think they mean... but perhaps it's... Let me check." However, they can't do a lot of it and remain coherent.

Public performance. Conference interpreting, and some of its extensions like interpreting for TV, are a performing art. Today the Expert Interpreter may be acoustically scrutinised, and on occasion criticised, by audiences of millions. It's the kind of scrutiny that actors and public speakers must endure, and student interpreters need to have a 'baptism of fire' of it as part of their training. It's also one reason most Professional Written Translators don't want to do interpreting; they prefer to work semi-anonymously at their quiet desks..

Researchers on Language Brokering have posited yet another kind of stress which affects that kind of Natural Interpreter, namely acculturative stress: "responding to competing demands of two cultural worlds on a daily basis" (see References).

The physiological stress level has been measured by objective indicators in conference interpreters:

"The physiological data collected was blood pressure, heart rate and salivary cortisol levels in a sample of 48 interpreters who wore monitors over a 24 hour period."

This was the kind of stress that forced me to give up conference interpreting permanently after a serious illness.

What can interpreters do to relieve stress?

• Practice Transcendental Meditation (I did) or some other form of ‘yoga‘.
• Smoke. Out of fashion socially. But there was a time, terminating around 1980, when conference interpreters smoked, even chain-smoked, in the booth. There’s an old United Nations video that shows it unabashed (see References).
• Take all necessary measures to stay fit. My cardiologist says that mental stress never killed anybody who was in good shape physically.

After so much that sounds negative, is there a good side to interpreter stress? In the late 1960s, I happened to be working at the University of Montreal directly under the offices of a great pioneer of research on stress, Hans Selye (see References). I learnt from one his lectures that stress is a normal condition, not something to be afraid of. There's a noteworthy finding in the AIIC study:

"No correlation was found between the physiological indices and performance levels."

But to take it a step further, perhaps the stress is necessary for the topmost level of performance, as in other performing arts. The AIIC study didn't include adrenalin levels.

References

• Sandy Walsh. Release the voice within. The Linguist, June/July 2013, pp. 10-11. You can read it here.
• Jennifer Mackintosh. The AIIC workload study - executive summary. 2003. Click here.
• Hans Selye. The Wikipedia article about him is here. 
• Robert S. Weisskirch and Sylvia Alatorre Alva. Language brokering and the acculturation of Latino children. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 24, 2002. Full text here.
• United Nations Organization. Other Voices. New York: United Nations Film Services, c1975. 27 mins. Although it's old, this is still a classic introduction for students and the general public. I have it on CD if anybody wants a copy. 

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Telepresence Options

One Hundred Years of Ronjat

Parents and other family with bilingual children must have noticed since time immemorial that their children could translate. However, the first study of the phenomenon by a trained linguist was published just a century ago this year in French. It was Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue (Language Development as Observed in a Bilingual Child) by the Franco-Swiss linguist Jules Ronjat.

Ronjat was French but he taught at the University of Geneva. He was therefore a contemporay there of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, but there's no indication that they knew one another.

Ronjat’s speciality wasn't child language but the study of Occitan, a Romance language still spoken in Southern France and in Catalonia. Indeed it doesn't appear that he ever published again on the subject of child language. We owe this pioneer work, therefore, to the chance circumstance of his having a bilingual child himself.

The child was his son Louis. Louis Ronjat was born in 1908 at Vienne, on the River Rhône in France, and observed by his father from birth until fourth year. Louis considered himself trilingual, because besides fluent French and German he also knew a little Franco-Provençal (which is closely related to Occitan).

It was not only the first study but the first longitudinal case study of language development in a bilingual child. Its focus is on phonetics, which was a flourishing area of linguistics at the time. However, it contains many interesting examples of translation and related phenomena (e.g. bilingual lexical pairing) produced by Louis at an early age. Louis acquired French and German simultaneously from his parents, their families and their household. His mother was German speaking. Ronjat and his wife followed the one person one language (OPOL) principle, which Ronjat had learnt from fellow linguist and child language observer Maurice Grammont (see references). The method requires that each parent speak only their own language with the child; the rationale being that infants associate languages with the people who speak them and that OPOL therefore helps them keep their two languages separate. In the same spirit, the Ronjats abstained from making Louis translate for them; therefore his translations were as spontaneous as possible. There was a good deal of personal communication between Ronjat and Grammont, but the latter didn't mention translation.

The translation data begins with Louis' earliest translations, at  1 year 9 months, preceded by even earlier 'pretranslation' phenomena like pairing words with the same meaning in his two languages. It continues until, by four years old, he was performing language brokering within the family circle, and Ronjat says of him at that age,

“Son habileté de traducteur… est… remarquable quand il s’agit de trouver une équivalence d’idiotismes… Ce n’est point de la lexicographie courante, mais de l’excellente stylistique instinctive. (He shows remarkable skill as a translator when it comes to finding equivalents for idioms… it is far more than everyday lexicography, it is excellent intuitive stylistics.” (p. 95)

An appendix links Louis’ language development to his general cognitive development.

I'm trying to see what can be done to make the book available again outside the libraries.

References

• Jules [Antoine] Ronjat (University of Geneva), 1864-1925. Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue. Supplementary dissertation for Doctorat ès Lettres, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Paris. Paris: Champion, 1913. 155 p. Édouard Champion was a celebrated publisher and bibliophile. He died in 1938 but his publishing house lives on.
• Maurice Grammont. Observations sur le langage des enfants (Remarks on Child Language), Paris, Klincksieck, 1902. By coincidence, Klincksieck now owns Champion.

 Image

 I first learnt about Ronjat from a reference in a paper by the Canadian educational psychologist Merrill Swain. Then I was extremely lucky: I found a copy of it almost next door to me in the library of the University of Montreal. It hadn't been borrowed for over 20 years. It was probably there because the U of M was already established as a French-speaking university when the book was published and because, being Jesuit, it had a good linguistics department. Later I was able to acquire a copy of my own from a second-hand bookseller. It bears an inscription in Ronjat's own hand, "Bien cordial souvenir (With best wishes) – Jules Ronjat," but I don't know who he sent it to. The image above is from my copy.