Greetings to NPIT2

Today, 29th May, the Second International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation opens at Germersheim in Germany.

Greetings to everyone there, and especially to those of you who, thanks to Rachele Antonini, I was able to meet in person at Forli.

I see there are 69 papers on the programme (it’s at http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/ikk/439.php) and they cover a wide range of settings. The success of the conference is assured. I’m glad to see that the East Hampshire Young Interpreters, so often featured on this blog, are represented; and that Jonathan Downie has obtained adequate space for the church interpreters.

Still you are the Pioneers. Give or take another 20 years and the rest of the Translation Studies community will/may/should have caught up with you. It’s now over 100 years since Jules Ronjat published Le développement du langage chez un enfant bilingue and nearly 40 since I published The Importance of Natural Translation, so it’s about time.

Translatology (Brian Harris)

Parent Interpreters

People tend to associate Natural and Native Translation with children and young people. Perhaps because they regard them as mere stages towards the achievement of Expert Translation, which is wrong because they are useful and much used in themselves. Moreover, the Natural Tanslation Hypothesis predicts that bilinguals may go through them at any age. So it follows that while children commonly develop their translation ability by following the example of their parents, the opposite may occur.

The East Hampshire Young Interpreters movement, which has had considerable success encouraging children to translate in UK schools, has now launched another pioneering venture: that of getting the parents fo join in. The scheme has been tried out at Fairfields Primary School in Basingstoke.

“The group of parents who volunteered to take part in the Parent Interpreter pilot completed their training before the Easter holiday. They received their certificates and even their very own kits containing their ground rules, fans, stickers, notepads and pencils to help them support pupils in the school. The group comprises native speakers of English as well as bilingual parents. This term, the Parent Interpreters are supporting pupils in lessons and meeting regularly to catch up and review the progress of the children. Congratulations on their hard work!

“Are you interested in setting up a Parent Interpreter scheme at your school? If so, please contact Hampshire EMTAS for more details.”


Reference
Young Interpreters Newsletter, No. 14, May 2014.

For more about the Young Interpreters, enter emtas in the Search box on the right or click here.

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Fairfields Primary School, Basingstoke. As the image suggests, it's the oldest school in Basingstoke; but the exterior belies the modern education within. © Copyright Chris Talbot and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.

Symposium on the History of Interpreting

The First International Symposium on the History of Interpreting is scheduled to take place at Rikkyo, Japan, next Saturday and Sunday, May 24-25.

As it’s only a short event with select invited speakers, one can’t expect too much of it. The topic is a vast one. Nevertheless, there’s something about the programme that disquiets me greatly. It’s that although considerable amounts must have been spent on bringing the distinguished invited experts from round the globe and the hosts are Japanese, there’s nothing about the very interesting history of interpreting in Japan itself. There’s one paper about Taiwan, aka Formosa when it was under Japanese rule, but that hardly counts as Japan. Where were the conference programme organisers sleeping?

Therefore, as a fringe contribution to the conference, I offer my own article from a decade ago about Ernest Satow, the young Englishman who, with his British Foreign Office and Japanese colleagues, revolutionised diplomatic interpreting in that country in the 1860s. You can find an extract and a reference to the complete article at https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS or by clicking here.

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The young Ernest Satow (later Sir Ernest Satow, Ambassador to Japan, etc.) Source: Yokahama Archives of History.

The Lure of Music

In the far-off days when I was teaching English as a Second Language to French Canadians at the National Film Board in Montreal, I made a powerful discovery. It was really nothing new, but it was new to me; because in that era the fashion in North American TESOL was for boring, repetitious pattern drills. It was that the work which met with most success with my students was learning to sing current popular songs. I used My Fair Lady in the impeccable Received Pronunciation of Rex Harrison. Not only did the students, all sophisticated adults, enthusiastically absorb colloquial English by heart, but it gave them that all-important ingredient: motivation. Everybody has fun singing along. However, due to the colloquial register of the words and the phonetic deformations caused by fitting them to the music, non-natives often have great difficulty hearing and understanding them. Therefore they get a kick out of finally knowing what they are listening to.

I was reminded of this by the following report (with my emphasis).

“I am a 27 year-old with the double nationality French-Spanish. I have been translating professionally since 2011, but the first time I translated something was when I was a kid. My family from France came to Spain and needed an interpreter to follow them around. [This was, of course, language brokering.]

“Then I studied translation at the University of Murcia and I have my Master’s degree from the UAB [at Barcelona] on Audiovisual Translation.

“How did you decide to be a translator? What makes you so passionate about languages?

“When I was 13 I heard a Bon Jovi song I loved very much, and I decided to translate it. I spoke no English whatsoever, but with the help of a dictionary I managed to ‘translate’ it, more or less. I liked it and started to do so with all his albums, the musical Grease, and many other songs. By the time I had to choose a career, I realized the career had already chosen me.”

Bon Jovi? A far cry from Rex Harrison. But it’s music.

References
Jovana. This career has chosen me – interview with translator Iris Permuy. Lingoio, 6 May, 2014. Click here or go to Lingo.io/blog/interview-with-translator-iris-Permuy/# N.B. This link has been corrected.

There’s plenty of Bon Jovi on YouTube. Plenty of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady too.

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Iris Permuy. Source: Lingo.io.

University Students As Advanced Native Translators

A good source of volunteer non-Expert translators for NGOs is university students. There are plenty of them in most countries who are foreigners or who at least know a foreign language. They aren’t Experts because they haven’t received training and lack experience; but on the other hand nor are they naive Natural Translators. The very fact that they volunteer for translating shows they have some awarenes of it. More than that, however, their migrations and their education will almost certainly have obliged them to use translations and even do some themselves, either perceptibly or in their heads. This is especially true of any language learning courses, because even now the grammar and translation method is still widespread. These experiences place them, on my scale of translating ability development, as Advanced Native Translators. (For the complete scale, enter definitions in the Search box on the right.)

It’s often a form of social service. The latest example to come my way is from prestigious Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

"Early this academic year we wrote about World Pulse Correspondent Neema Namadamu’s visit to campus as part of Agnès Peysson Zeiss’ Praxis III French course in which students translated blog posts for the organization. We revisited the class in October to get an even better sense of what the students were doing to help women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Now, Seniors Su Oner and Lianna Reed have written a piece of their own on what it meant to work with the women…

"Over the past year, through the Praxis III program…, we have worked as volunteer translators for World Pulse. This semester, six of us have translated four ten blogs a week. Although we are comfortable with our French, it remains a challenge to this day to read and translate Congolese French into English. Many of the women… for many of them, French is not their mother tongue. Our weekly meeting with Professor Agnès Peysson Zeiss focused primarily on understanding challenging blogs so that we could translate them into English. We often come to class with words written phonetically that we cannot decipher. Other times there are idioms and acronyms that we are not familiar with. It all comes together when we post the blogs below the original version on the World Pulse website. We comment under the blogs we translate and interact with these women (in French) through these comments."

Notice this last remark mentions that the translators also comment - something that Expert Interpreters aren't supposed to do according to dogma.

An unexpected mention in this report is Congolese French. All the major languages have varieties and dialects that may be more or less understandable to people brought up on the ’standard’ language taught in schools. Congolese French still bears traces of the country’s colonial past, which has bequeathed it similarities to Belgian French. Canadian French can also be hard for Europeans to understand. We Canadians are sometimes amused to see our films and TV programmes subtitled in so-called International French for export. People can be quite ignorant about dialects. I was once called in to interpret Glaswegian (the English of Glasgow) on the grounds that after all I'd been educated in England. My favourite story in this respect is about how Gaddafi stymied the very Expert Arabic interpreters at the United Nations in New York by addressing the General Assembly without warning in his native Libyan dialect. The problem is particularly acute in court interpreting, as this current example shows:

"Exactly three years after they were arrested at Toronto’s Pearson airport, a pair of accused Jamaican drug smugglers remain unable to stand trial because of a critical shortage of Jamaican Patois interpreters."

It may be more satisfactory to employ a Native Interpreter who knows the dialect than an Expert Interpreter who doesn't.

References
Sue Oner and Lianna Reed. BMC Seniors reflect on translating blogs for women from Democratic Republic of Congo. Bryn Mawr Commmunications Office, 30 April 2014. Click here.

Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wikipedia, 2014.

Mark M. Orkin. French Canajan, Hé!. 1975. Out of print, but the second-hand copies from Amazon are inexpensive.

Multi-Languages Corporation. Jamaican patois interpreter shortage causes mistrial, leaving alleged drug smugglers in legal limbo. Multi-Language Newsletter, May 2014.

Crowdsourcing: Translation Commons

Crowdsourcing is changing not only the way translations are done, but also the way people think about translating. When I broke away as a maverick translatologist 40 years ago, the notion that useful and usable translations could be done by bilinguals with no training was anathema to the community of Professional Translators and to their trainers in the translation schools. And the general public followed suit in principle if not in practice. I say “not in practice” because in reality there always were many translators who made money as professionals yet were not trained as Expert Translators.

Nowadays the crowdsourcing of translations, either through cooperatives or through agencies, is too prevalent to be ignored or to be dismissed as unacceptable. Even such a universally read source of information as Wikipedia couldn't function without it. Users do make mistakes and go to the wrong kind of translator, but hopefully they’re learning that each kind has its place. The crowdsourced translators usually lay no claim to being experts. Yet nor are they naïve Natural Translators. They are Native Translators, who have learnt by absorption; that is to say by reading or listening to other people’s translations. And they just assume they were born capable of doing it.

The latest example to reach me is Translation Commons. Irish. Let it speak for itself (but with my emphasis).

"A University of Limerick spin-off has gained 5,000 language volunteers world-wide for its Translation Commons platform.
"The Translation Commons matches non-profit translation projects and organisations with volunteer translators, delivering free translation services in to 120 non-profit organisations in 27 countries.
"The platform was launched less than a year ago by the Rosetta Foundation, a non-profit spin-off from the University of Limerick, that works to provide equal access to information and knowledge across the languages of the world.
"The Rosetta Foundation has worked with 88, the most common being English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Catalan, Polish and Arabic.
"Reinhard Schäler, CEO and foundertranslation of The Rosetta Foundation, said: 'Language volunteers have shown that there are no language barriers. The real barrier is access to costly language services which the Translation Commons have brought into the reach of communities that need them most.'
“'At the moment we have around five new volunteer registrations per day, and the most active community is the Spanish one with around 2,000 volunteers. Access to and sharing information in your own language is a fundamental universal human right – one that The Rosetta Foundation is committed to preserve and protect.'”

References
TechCentral Reporters. Translation Commons passes 5,000 volunteer mark. TechCentral.ie, 2014. Click here. http://www.techcentral.ie/translation-commons-passes-5000-volunteer-mark/

Julie McDonough Donough. Wikipedia translation projects: Take 2. Some Thoughts on Translation Research and Teaching blog, 2014.

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University of Limerick arms.

Personal Footnote
To those who know about my recent accident, the good news is my shoulder is healing well. But I’ll have to go through a period of rehab after Easter before I can write normally.

Translation Nation

A few posts ago (February 20), there was one on this blog about Translators in Schools. British schools, that is. Now here's some information about a related UK initiative called Translation Nation. Actually it's the elder of the two, though it's slipped under my radar until now.

"Translation Nation is an award-winning project which aims to inspire children and young people to begin or continue what we hope is a lifelong exploration of literature and culture from around the world. The project promotes pride and enthusiasm for the many languages that are spoken or taught in UK schools, encourages recognition for the important role translation plays in our lives, and encourages an enjoyment and appreciation of literary English and the nuances of the English language."

The project is a partnership between Eastside Educational Trust and the Stephen Spender Trust. (Though the name sounds American, Eastside refers here to the East End of London.) It was started in 2010 for primary schools and in 2012 it received both the European Language Label and the EuroTalk Primary Education Language Prize. The project was also re-launched that year to extend its work to primary schools.

"Translation Nation empowers primary school children as translators, interpreters and storytellers of international stories. It celebrates the many community languages spoken by the children and encourages a curiosity about world literature. Working in small groups under the guidance of language experts, the children translate into English and re-interpret stories that their parents have shared with them from their home languages. The process introduces the children to literary fiction and by including music, props and performance the children find it easy to become engaged and the workshops encourage a more thoughtful, confident, nuanced and imaginative approach to writing in English

"Translation Nation in secondary schools creatively and persuasively highlights to students the value of multi-lingualism today and the opportunities it brings in social and professional contexts and in accessing global literature and culture. The project enables pupils through a single workshop to build confidence as translators and to see the relevance of the modern foreign languages (MFLs) they learn in school. It promotes the continuation of MFL learning to equip pupils with highly desirable tools for the future."

These initiatives are – or should be – important to translatologists because they extend significantly the scope of translating by children and adolescents. In recent years, most of the research attention in this area, and especially in the USA, has been focused on child language brokering (CLB), which means basically the translating that individual bilingual children of immigrant families do in order to help out other, less bilingual members of their families and immediate entourages. This has expanded, mainly in the UK, to organised LB teams in schools, and even to a whole movement like the East Hampshire Young Interpreters (enter hampshire in the Search box on the right). It does reinforce our certainty that normal children without special gifts or teaching can translate, but it has a serious limitation. Which is that CLB is only done for utilitarian purposes and to maintain personal relations with its beneficiaries.

Now comes a quite different kind of stimulus and a quite different kind of adult intervention. The interveners aren't school teachers but are themselves translators or "language experts". And their aim is not utilitarian but to help children's cultural development. This goes along with the general observation that although most translating may be performed to facilitate practical communication, there is nevertheless a great deal which is not (starting with the ludic translating done by the very young like Leopold's daughter.) Activities such as TN point the way to how children's natural translating ability can be developed in pleasure-giving non-utilitarian areas too.

References
Eastside Educational Trust. Translation Nation: inspiring literature in translation in schools. Click here.

Werner F. Leopold. Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A Linguist’s Record. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1939-1949. Reprinted New York: AMS, 1970.

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Source: www.eastside.org.uk