From Natural to Expert Translator, With Essential Definitions

This blog constantly bandies about terms like Natural Translator and Native Translator; and although there’s a side panel telling readers how to find definitions of them, it requires going back a long way. So I’ll take a pause and try to make them clearer. To that end, here's a diagram showing their relative positions in the development of translation ability and skills.

The terms mean what I want them to mean, which may well be different from the way other people use them. Especially the term Professional Translator, which professional translators themselves and people close to them such as translation teachers – including myself back in the 1970s – conflate with Expert Translator. To me now, Professional Translator means someone who does translating as a livelihood, whether full time or part time. The reality is that many professional translators are not well trained or qualified, even though you have a right to expect them to be if you’re paying them well (but not if you’re underpaying them). And on the other hand, there are many people who can translate as well as the Experts but who don’t do it as a profession. They’re common among academics; colleagues have occasionally taken time from their own work to translate an article for me. When Samuel Moore, a lawyer by profession, translated the Communist Manifesto into English for Marx and Engels – surely a challenge with them looking over his shoulder – he did so out of friendship and conviction. (See post of May 2, 2010.)

At first I only distinguished between Natural Translators and Professional Translators, but that was too crude. Now I reserve Natural Translators for bilinguals who’ve had no training, instruction or specific guidance at all in translating and so they do it intuitively and spontaneously. Since bilinguals usually come while still young under the influence of other people translating or are exposed to examples of translation, the best time to catch pure Natural Translators for study is in their early childhood. Once they go to school, it’s difficult to sift out the influences. However, they may be older.

The next level, Native Translators, is that of bilinguals who have in fact been exposed to and influenced by examples: examples of other people translating and examples of translations done by other people. Here too I’ve realised that the categorisation is too crude. There’s a large gap between what a school-age child absorbs and what, say, a literary translator has learnt by years of reading that includes translations. Therefore it’s necessary to distinguish between Beginner Native Translator and Advanced Native Translator.

Language Broker is a term that wasn’t coined by translation specialists but by educationists and sociologists. Language brokers are typically young Native Translators, sometimes Natural Translators, who interpret in a particular social context: that of immigrant communities whose members need to communicate with the host community. The term is new; my own first encounters with the phenomenon came in the 1970s before the term existed. I don’t like the use of broker as if it entailed negotiating a deal – intermediary would be better, as in the German Sprachmittler – but it’s here to stay.

Coming shortly to this blog: A mediaeval tale of alphabets.

Military Interpreters – Postscript

Having written in my post yesterday about the treatment of military interpreters and the chaos in Iraq, I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised by a headline in this morning’s electronic edition of The Guardian newspaper:
Army's Iraqi interpreters face hardship after fleeing to UK.

Read all about it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/07/iraqi-interpreter-refugees-jobless-Britain.

Still, they’re lucky to have got out alive from that hapless country.

Bilingualism and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal - Conclusions

Photo: ‘IMTFE official interpreter’ from Wikimedia Commons. Note the IBM branding on his headset, and that he's taking notes for consecutive interpretation. The man next to him is likely a Monitor, and the non-Japanese to the right is perhaps an Arbitrator. (See previous posts.)

Though the Tokyo Trials took place long ago, we can still learn some things from Watanabe’s account of the most important one.

1. Even for important occasions that call for Professional Expert interpreting, it’s possible in extremis to make use of well-educated Native Translators instead. The latter will learn on the job:

Interpretation was inadequate in the earlier phase of the Trial (around May and June of 1946), sometimes giving only a summary of the exchange. Over time, interpreters’ and monitors’ work and cooperation improved, providing an adequate teamwork performance by March 1947.

However, it’s essential to provide a ‘safety net’ in the form of Expert Monitoring, and corrections must be admitted when the monitors spot mistakes. There was one monitor to every three interpreters at Tokyo, and the monitors did much more than just check the interpretation.

The monitor supported the interpreter – for example taking notes for them of details such as dates, periods, etc.

and so on.

To sum up then, it appears that Native Translators can be used in place of Expert Interpreters subject to three requirements: monitoring, teamwork and time to learn.

2. The pool from which the Expert Monitors were drawn in Tokyo was formed of Military Interpreters. Military interpretation has yet to be accorded its due importance in the history, training and treatment of interpreters – and in translation studies, though it’s been around at least since the time of the Ancient Egyptians. The organisation of military interpreting in recent times has been notoriously ad hoc; and in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s been chaotic, with the American military offloading its recruitment needs to private contractors. The Americans did start to train interpreters for Japanese just before Pearl Harbour, but it was too little and too late. The British were caught even worse off guard - but that’s another story. However, the skills of many Expert Military Interpreters were ultimately forged in the fire of the Pacific battles.

Perhaps, though, the most interesting lesson we can learn in this instance about Military Interpreters is that their role doesn’t end when the war does. Armistices must be negotiated, and after that there are other negotiations that are undertaken by the generals of the opposing forces. The generals naturally turn to the interpreters closest to them. Then there may be tribunals, as we have seen, and a period of occupation by the army of the victorious power as happened in Japan.

Reference
Tomie Watanabe. Interpretation at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: an overview and Tojo’s cross-examination. TTR (Montreal), 22:1.57-91, 2010.

Bilingualism and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal - 2

Continued from the previous post.
That the interpreters for the Trials weren't up to the level of Expert or Professional Translators doesn’t mean they had no acquaintance with translation. Some of them were officials from the Foreign Ministry, one at least was a journalist, one a university student. They were therefore presumably at some level of Native Translator.

Nevertheless, the American organisers of the interpreting were faced with two problems:

* Their interpreters were untrained and inexperienced
* As the interpreters had to be recruited in Japan, they might be suspected of bias in favour of the accused.

They therefore put in place a system of checks:

Monitors from officials of the Allied Powers would be relied upon to check and correct the interpretation.

Here bilingualism enters the picture again, but from a different direction. There were four monitors.

All four were Kibei Nisei, second generation residents of the US who were born in US but raised and educated in Japan, and then returned to the US before the outbreak of WWII. They were bilingual (English and Japanese) and were expected to be well versed in Japanese culture. During WWII, they worked for ATIS (the Allied Powers’ Translation and Interpretation Section). They were involved in intelligence activities such as tapping lines of communication, code breaking, prisoner interrogation, information collection from diaries, memos and other materials seized from Japanese soldiers killed during the war. They had gathered sufficient knowledge about WWII to perform to perform their tasks at the Tokyo Trial.

They were therefore Professional Expert translators by 1945, with much of the background knowledge required.

One such Japanese American was Steve Shizuma Yamamoto, who went on to have a long and successful career in the American Army (see photo). He had acquired his experience as an interrogator, having conducted no fewer than 3,000 interrogations in New Guinea. He isn’t mentioned by Watanabe, perhaps because he didn’t take part in the first trial.

In spite of the time it took, the method of interpreting was consecutive interpretation; not simultaneous, which was still very novel. The task of the monitors was facilitated by the use of consecutive. Actually, the same model of IBM simultaneous interpretation equipment as was used at Nuremberg was installed at Tokyo, but it wasn’t used in the same way. Watanabe doesn’t explain why not, but we can surmise some of the reasons:

* The absence of an organiser in Tokyo with the clout that Léon Dostert wielded at Nuremberg as personal interpreter to Eisenhower.
* There was no time to train the inexperienced interpreters for simultaneous, and in any case there were no trainers in Japan.
* Something that was told me many years later by a Japanese interpreter, Sen Nishiyama, who had begun his career in that era: the Japanese believed that English-Japanese simultaneous would be impossible because of the wide difference in sentence structure between the two languages. They were wrong. Under American pressure during the Occupation, simultaneous was in fact introduced into Japan in the 1950s.

Above the monitors was yet another tier, the Language Arbitration Board. Its members were unilingual English. Their task was to decide on any dispute or difficulty that could not be settled by the monitors. They were concerned mainly with terminology.

Once the interpretation of a disputed word was resolved by the Board, the arbitrated translation had to be used for the rest of the trial.

Some of the difficulties arose from cultural differences. There were moments when even Tojo intervened to try to clarify.

It is undeniable that [in some instances] Tojo’s rapid understanding and response, as well as his adamant assertion of translation errors, led to language arbitration… It must be added that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal recognized the importance of cultural gaps.

The last part of Watanabe’s article is devoted to examples of interventions by interpreters and monitors, of arbitration, and particularly to the dispute over the translation of the Japanese word taian: did it mean reply to a proposal or counter-proposal? A lot depended on that single word.

Though the Tribunal has been criticised as unjust and even some of the judges issued obiter dicta at the time questioning its procedures, standards of evidence and vengeful ‘show trial’ nature, this criticism has not been directed at the interpretation. On the contrary,

There were no significant translation errors, because whenever erroneous or inappropriate interpretation was rendered by an interpreter, the monitor pressed a buzzer, lit a red light and corrected the interpretation.

In Watanabe`s opinion,

The monitors carried out their painstaking work within their capacity to secure the Japanese accused’s right to a fair trial.

To be concluded.

References
Tomie Watanabe. Interpretation at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: an overview and Tojo’s cross-examination. TTR (Montreal), 22:1.57-91, 2010.

Sen Nishiyama. Translation and interpretation in Japan. Meta (Montreal), 28:1.95-110, 1983.

Photo
http://www.warofourfathers.com/war/new_guinea_yamamoto015.html.
A magnificent Karsh-quality portrait. A pity they don’t name the photographer.

Bilingualism and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

Usually the Canadian translation studies journal TTR (which stands for Texte, Terminologie, Rédaction) is of no interest for this blog. But you never know… The latest issue is a special one on translation in Japan. Mostly it’s about sophisticated literary translation, but among the articles of that kind is sandwiched a very unusual one that does concern us. It's Tomie Watanabe’s description of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal of 1946-1948.

The Tokyo Trials paralleled the Nuremberg Trials that had started a few months earlier in Europe. Both of them used large numbers of interpreters. However, though they were both important in the history of court interpreting, the Tokyo Trials have received only a fraction of the attention that the Nuremberg Trials have. That’s what makes Watanabe’s quite detailed analysis so valuable.

The first and most famous of the trials was that of the Japanese war leaders and their major henchmen. At its coclusion, 25 were found guilty and seven of them, including General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese Prime Minister (see photo of him wearing headphones at the trial), were sentenced to death and hanged.

As at Nuremberg, the logistics were organised by the Americans, but all their Far East allies participated in the trial itself.

The official languages… were English and Japanese. However, there were participants who spoke other languages as well, for example, the prosecutor representing France spoke only French. Therefore, not only English- but also Chinese-, French-, Russian- and Dutch-Japanese… services were added, when necessary. English-Japanese interpreters performed interpretation in both directions. Relay interpretation was conducted when other languages were added.

How to find the interpreters?

The Allied Powers would have preferred non-Japanese interpreters…, but they soon discovered that it was absolutely impossible due to the complete absence of this resource in those days. Shimada [one of the interpreters] said that he was surprised how poor the Japanese proficiency was among the interpreters of the Allied Powers, noting that this was proof that the Japanese language was little known or used in the world before World War II. It was then decided that interpreters should be hired from among the Japanese, and monitors from among officials of the Allied Powers would be relied upon to check and correct the interpretation.

Now we come to the key passage as far as this blog is concerned:

The Japanese interpreters had no experience working as professional interpreters before the trial... English proficiency was the only qualification for being hired… It was extremely difficult in those days to find qualified interpreters with sufficient command of English and Japanese, as well as with an adequate knowledge of the historical and cultural background and of the legal terminology. It is clear, then, that the minimum qualification of a good command of English became the selection criterion.

In other words, the recruitment criterion was not interpreting qualifications but bilingualism. Furthermore,

Interpreters were given no prior training or preparatory classes. They received only technical information about the courtroom.

Mock trials were used, but only as an aptitude test, not for training.

To be continued.


Term
Relay interpretation means that a speech is first interpreted from language A to language B and then re-interpreted by another interpreter from language B to language C. Thus, if no French-Japanese interpreter was available, it might be interpreted first from French to English and then from English to Japanese.

References
Tomie Watanabe. Interpretation at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: an overview and Tojo’s cross-examination. TTR, 22:1.57-91, 2010.
The author is a conference interpreter. She teaches interpretation at Daito Bunka University and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. The article is based on her M.A. thesis.

TTR has a website at http://www.uottawa.ca/associations/act-cats/English/Journal_TTR/Journal_TTR.htm.

There's also a recent book:
Kayoko Takeda. Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. Available from Amazon.

Hideki Tôjô. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideki_T%C5%8Dj%C5%8D. (This article also quotes an illuminating report by Shuichi Mizota, interpreter for Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, about the pressure exerted by General MacArthur to exonerate Emperor Hirohito and all members of the imperial family from criminal prosecution.)

Natural Translation Has No Age Limit

The other evening we went to a dinner party held for a friend’s birthday in a local restaurant.

We were nine at table:

Eight could speak English
Of the eight, five could only speak English
Three could speak English and Spanish
One could only speak Spanish.

It was obvious and inevitable that the conversation would be conducted overwhelmingly in English; and that the ninth person, the unilingual Spanish speaker – let’s call him Jorge – would be isolated for most of the meal unless we did something about it. So I sat down next to him, expecting to interpret.

I needn’t have bothered. Seated opposite Jorge was a bilingual Spanish lady. She interpreted for him everything that was said in English, sometimes in full and sometimes in summary. She said it out loud, she didn’t whisper it; but there’s always so much noise in Spanish restaurants – and especially Valencian ones – that nobody was disturbed by her. She also translated into English things that she had first said herself to Jorge in Spanish. I noticed that sometimes she produced translations of items on the menu faster than I could think of them myself: clóchinas/small mussels and costillas adobadas/marinated spareribs for example. I ended up doing barely a few words of interpretation throughout the four hours.

Now, I happen to know something about that lady’s background. She was born and brought up in Spain and left school at age 14. She had no higher education. At 16 she went to England as an au pair girl (a young foreign woman who helps out with household chores and childcare in exchange for board and lodging). There she married a unilingual Englishman and stayed in England for some 50 years. So her English became fluent, though she still has a heavy accent which leaves you in no doubt that she isn’t a native speaker. She returned to live in Spain 12 years ago. She had no training in translation, not even an English language course.

She therefore conformed to the two basic elements in the definition of a Natural Translator:

* No training in translation
* Translating in everyday circumstances.

She must have had some exposure to translation, and have done quite a lot of it spontaneously as at this dinner. But still I would say that she comes close to being a Natural Translator.

She’s now in her late seventies. Natural Translation has no age limit.

Franco, Hitler and Gibraltar

Today is the anniversary, the 70th anniversary, of a fateful encounter in the history of modern Spain. It was on October 23, 1940 that Franco arrived by train to meet Hitler (see photo) in the station of the French border town of Hendaye a few kilometres from San Sebastian.

Hitler’s intention was to pressure Franco into joining the war on the Axis side and allowing his army free passage across Spain to seize Gibraltar from the British. Despite his enormous ascendancy as conqueror of France and commander of the largest, best equipped army in Europe, he didn’t succeed. Indeed he abruptly and rather rudely left the conversations, which had gone on all afternoon and until late into the evening, frustrated and annoyed. Pro-Franco propaganda later portrayed the Spanish Caudillo (Leader) as a canny politician whose heroic, imperturbable stubbornness saved a war-weary Spain from getting involved on the losing side. This version is still hotly debated by the historians. As always, the truth is more complex. What concerns us here, though, is not the discussions themselves but the interpreters. We know who they were.

Only six people were present in the railway saloon car where the discussions took place. They were: Hitler and his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Franco, accompanied by his foreign minister (and brother-in-law of his wife) Ramón Serrano Suñer; and the two interpreters. The face-to-face between the leaders would have been impossible without the interpreters: neither Hitler nor Ribbentrop knew Spanish and neither Franco nor Serrano Suñer spoke German. Ribbentrop and Serrano Suñer could speak French, but not their bosses.

It’s long been customary in diplomatic interpreting for each side to bring its own interpreter, who only translates what his or her own delegation says. This was done at Hendaye and the method they used was full consecutive interpretation, in which the interpreter waits for the speaker to finish an entire speech before translating. To help remember everything, the interpreter takes notes. It’s a slow method, because in effect everything has to be said twice, and this is one reason why the meeting lasted so long. However, it offers the advantage that it gives the speakers time to think during the interpretations, which probably helped Franco to avoid being browbeaten.

Franco’s interpreter was Luis Álvarez de Estrada y Luque, Barón de las Torres – a magnificent name and title, but I’ll call him De las Torres for short. He wasn’t officially an interpreter, but he was a seasoned career diplomat, Head of Protocol in the Foreign Ministry, and in that post he must have done and listened to a lot of interpreting in his time. His German was excellent and apparently he had a quick ear, for it’s to him that we owe our knowledge of the deprecating remark that he overheard Hitler mutter to Ribbentrop at a moment of frustration: Mit diesem Kerle ist nichts zu tun (There’s nothing to be done with this fellow).

Hitler’s interpreter was named Gross. We know less about him because he was only a second choice, a subordinate. Hitler’s preference would no doubt have been for his famous diplomatic interpreter, Paul Schmidt, the head interpreter of the German foreign ministry. Schmidt had interpreted between Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich, and in fact he was present in the entourage at Hendaye, but he couldn’t be called upon that day because he didn’t work in Spanish. Gross is said to have been incompetent.

As they parted, Franco, who was worried by Hitler’s attitude, decided to emphasise his esteem for him in a typically Spanish manner. He stood up and pressed Hitler’s hand between both of his, and declared, “In spite of what we’ve said, if the day ever comes when Germany really needs me I will be at your side unconditionally and without asking for anything in return.”

Gross failed completely to translate this, and so Franco's parting gesture of reconciliation went for nothing. However, Serrano Suñer was actually glad of the interpreter’s gaffe, because he saw it as avoiding another commitment.

Although the work was shared between two interpreters, the strain of interpreting such momentous matters between two such powerful men must have been great. Remember that they also had to interpret the conversation at the dinner which Hitler offered to Franco and his entourage on the German train. By the time the meeting broke up at five to one in the morning, they must have been exhausted.

That wasn’t the end of the matter for the interpreters. Both of them drew up reports of the conversations within days. The one by De las Torres was the fuller, indeed the only full account for historians to draw on. It’s a first-hand account, whereas we only have Gross’s at second hand through Schmidt. No doubt De las Torres turned back to his interpreter’s notes to refresh his memory, as Paul Mantoux had done at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Personal Footnote
British Intelligence soon got wind of what had happened at Hendaye. It’s suspected that the leak may have came from De las Torres, who was an anglophile. Nevertheless, the British prepared for the worst. One measure they took was to evacuate the civilian population of Gibraltar to the UK. The children were placed in local schools, including the one that I was attending in London. The native Gibraltarians were bilingual in English and Spanish, though they mostly spoke English. It was from those children that I first heard Spanish.

References
Paul Preston. Franco and Hitler: the myth of Hendaye 1940. Contemporary European History, 1:1.1-16, 1992. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081423.

Eduardo Palomar Baró. Entrevista entre Franco y Hitler. Generalísimo Francisco Franco. http://www.generalisimofranco.com/historia/hendaya01.htm.

César Vidal. ¿Qué sucedió en la entrevista de Hendaya? (Enigmas de la Historia). Ideas, Libertad Digital supplements, August 8, 2003. http://revista.libertaddigital.com/1-que-sucedio-en-la-entrevista-de-hendaya-1275767998.html.

Paul Schmidt. Hitler’s Interpreter: The Secret History of German Diplomacy 1935-1945. London: Heinemann, 1951. Available from Amazon UK.

Paul Mantoux. The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24-June 28, 1919): Notes of the official interpreter. Translated and edited by Arthur S. Link with the assistance of Manfred F. Boemeke. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Available from Amazon USA.