The Other Visual Language Interpreters

In my post of May 2, I hinted that I’d describe some other kinds of Visual Language (VL) Interpreters that I’ve worked with besides the Sign Language ones.

But first a correction. Oliver Pouliot, an Expert VL Interpreter in London, England, writes to tell me that I was quite wrong to say most Sign Language interpreters are children of deaf parents. (I might have added, or siblings of a deaf brother or sister.) He goes on:

”This is in fact not true - most sign language interpreters are second language learners of the language. Although the profession began with us, it has continued and grown mainly via people who have encountered sign language later in their lives. I am not aware of any official statistics, but of our group, I am the only native signer.”

Well, it’s true my experience with VL interpreters goes back to the 1980s, so no doubt I’m out of date. Indeed, in the United States there seems to be a certain resentment felt by interpreters who are the children of deaf adults (CODAs), because some of them have formed an association called Interpreters with Deaf Parents (IDP) and their members deplore

“the lack of respect IDP's feel… in regards to our wealth of knowledge of the language and culture, and the lack of appropriate settings for codas to learn the interpreting process.”

Anyway, in view of the correction, I’ll put what follows in the past tense.

I used to interpret sometimes at meetings of the Canadian Coordinating Council on Deafness (CCCD). The participants were a mixture of deaf and hearing people. I was hired as a Voice Interpreter (see the May 2 post): my job was to translate between French and English, the two official languages in Canada. Beforehand, I had expected to be working alongside Sign Language Interpreters, and I was aware that there were two sign languages used in the country: American Sign Language (ASL) in the English community and Quebec Sign Language (LSQ) in the French one. They aren’t mutually intelligible. What I didn’t realise was that a large proportion of the hard of hearing population did not know either sign language, indeed some of them were resistant to learning them. It’s hard to determine just what proportion of the hard of hearing are signers and I don‘t have figures for Canada. The figures for the USA, for example, are very unreliable: see the Ross E. Mitchell reference below. On the other hand, there’s an official estimate for Scotland: 57,000 people with severe to profound deafness, 6,000 whose first or preferred language is British Sign Language, i.e. just over 10%. Clearly the non-signers are as important as the signers.

So how was communication maintained with the non-signers? For them, two other kinds of ‘interpreting’ were made available:

1. Oral Interpreting. Contrary to what you might think from the name, it doesn’t use the voice. Oral interpreters cater for lip readers. They repeat silently what the speaker is saying, but with well-articulated, even exaggerated, lip movements; and they place themselves where their clients can see them clearly. It might be said that it’s not really interpreting but shadowing, because there’s no change of language. Never mind; they’re called interpreters.

2. Note-taking. In this mode, a hearing person takes notes of what's being said and the notes are displayed to the hard of hearing audience. At the CCCD, the note-takers wrote on overhead projector transparencies and there were two screens, one for French notes and the other for English.

This by no means exhausted the possibilities. There were forms of communication that I did not see, for example Tactile (touch) Interpreting, made famous by Helen Keller and her teacher-interpreter Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Nevertheless, there was enough to make the interpretation set-up extremely complex. Suppose somebody made a statement in LSQ. It would go through the following stages:

1. The LSQ was translated into spoken French by a Sign Language Interpreter.
2. The spoken French was shadowed by a Francophone Oral Interpreter and summarised by a French Note-Taker.
3. Simultaneously with 2, a Voice Interpreter translated the spoken French into spoken English.
4. An ASL Interpreter translated the output from the Voice Interpreter into ASL for the English signers.
5. Simultaneously with 4, an English Oral Interpreter shadowed the Voice Interpreter and another Note-Taker summarised again.

In theory, it should have been possible to translate directly from LSQ to ASL, but there were only very few interpreters who knew both; so most of the time we had to make do with the relay method in which the Voice Interpreter acted as a pivot. By some miracle, it worked. Of course, the CCCD could count on Expert Interpreters.

Image
In this drawing of an Oral Interpreter at work, the interpreter sits facing a deaf person and shadows what’s being said by the people at the table behind. Source: The Itinerant Connection, http://www.theitinerantconnection.com/american_sign_language.htm.

References
The group Oliver Pouliot refers to is involved in the European Master in Sign Language Interpreting (EUMASLI), http://eumasli.eu/.

Interpreters with Deaf Parents. http://idp-rid.org.

Ross E. Mitchell, et al. How many people use ASL in the United States? Why estimates need updating. Sign Language Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, 2006.

Statistics. Scottish Council on Deafness. http://www.scod.org.uk/Statistics-i-152.html.

Helen Keller Biography. American Foundation for the Blind. http://www.afb.org/section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=129.

Lost and Found

A post last week said the Followers panel had disappeared from this page. Thanks to a contributor to the Blogger Help Forum, I’ve got it back. The solution may be of help to other people too. It was to update my browser from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8.

Glad to see you again.

A New Study of Language Brokering

Publications about Language Brokering (LB) have been sparse of late, but here’s one. The author, Jennifer Kam (see photo), is new to me. It begins with a neat definition (the emphasis is mine):

“Language brokering is the communication process where individuals with no formal training (often children of immigrant families) linguistically mediate for two or more parties (usually adult family members and individuals from mainstream culture).”

The article is a good illustration of how LB research focuses on the sociological and psychological aspects of the activity rather than on the translating itself. The study examined the direct and indirect effects of language brokering on mental health and ‘risky’ behaviours among 684 Mexican-heritage youths from schools in Phoenix, Arizona. ‘Risky behaviours’ includes smoking and drinking alcohol. For more, see Reference below.

Reference
Jennifer A. Kam (School of Communication, Ohio State University). The Effects of Language Brokering Frequency and Feelings on Mexican-Heritage Youth's Mental Health and Risky Behaviors. Journal of Communication, Volume 61, Issue 3, pages 455–475, June 2011. Abstract at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01552.x/abstract.

Terms
Using linguistically mediate instead of translate is itself indicative of the social and psychological slant.

Journal of Communication thoughtfully provides translations of its abstracts in several languages, and this enables us to establish the following equivalences for language brokering.

German: Sprachvermittlung – actually a much older term than language brokering, but it often happens that old terms are given new uses.
French: médiation linguistique
Spanish: mediación del lenguaje
There’s also Chinese and Korean.

Image: Ohio State University.

Update on the Shafia Murder Case

Long-time readers who followed my posts about the Shafia family murder hearings in the spring of 2010 (to find them, enter shafia in the Search box) may perhaps be wondering what’s happened to the case since then.

Well, there was another preliminary hearing at Kingston, Ontario, last autumn. By then, there had clearly been concern to improve the working conditions for the court interpreters, something which I criticised last year. Better booths had been installed for the simultaneous interpretation, and they were better situated:

“Two translation booths, each capable of holding two interpreters, were erected on a large raised platform to the left of the judge. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of infra-red transmitters and receivers are in place, allowing everyone in the courtroom to listen to the simultaneous interpretation on wireless headsets."

Nonetheless, the start of the hearing was again troubled by interpretation woes; this time, not the fault of the interpreters but of the electronic equipment, so that recourse was eventually had to the traditional mode of in-court consecutive interpreting:

“A French-speaking Montreal police officer was the first witness. As she began testifying, it was soon obvious the French interpreter wasn't able to operate the equipment to ensure that English translations were transmitted properly. A technician rushed to the booth to help him, but after several failed attempts to sort out the problem, Lacelle [one of the prosecutors] suggested a low-tech solution. 'Your honour, I wonder if it might be more efficient to adopt the approach we had before,' she said. With that, the interpreter left the booth and stood next to the witness. He translated English and French by listening to the people on both sides of him.”

Which goes to show that SI equipment should always be tested immediately before the start of a session either by a technician or by the interpreters themselves. Even five minutes is long enough for it to develop a bug.

Anyway, a trial date was set for this spring. However, one of the accused decided to change his lawyer at the last moment, and the new lawyer asked the judge for more time to prepare. As a result, the trial has been postponed until, provisionally, October 11. Meanwhile the accused languish in prison.

They aren’t the only ones. In January, in Toronto, a judge of the Supreme Court of the same province, Ontario, refused the Crown's (i.e., the prosecution's) request to order separate trials for two men jointly accused of conspiracy to murder, because a qualified Arabic interpreter couldn't be found for one of them. As a result, the trial, originally set to begin in January 2011, won't start until January 2012. “The prosecution has had more than a year to find an interpreter,” the judge said. "A qualified Arabic interpreter should have been identified and arranged." But there’s only one accredited Arabic court interpreter for all Ontario and he’s not available for long trials.

The crisis in Ontario court interpreting has arisen because the province’s justice administration is running scared of a mistrial being declared due to poor interpreting. They've already had a bad experience. So now they insist on accreditation by means of a stiff examination. But they haven’t prepared the ground, as they should have done years ago, by getting together with the community colleges and the universities to sponsor adequate training programmes and by giving scholarships to promising candidates.

References
Rob Tripp. Translation woes snarl start of murder case. Edmonton Sun, October 5, 2010. http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/ottawa/2010/10/05/15595836.html.
Rob Tripp is the crime reporter who’s been reporting the Shafia proceedings from the beginning, and who, in the course of them, has developed an awareness of the interpretation component. The three languages involved are English, French, and Dari (an Afghan dialect of Persian).

Patrick F. D. McCann. Canal mass murder trial delayed by surprise firing of lawyer. McCann & Lyttle, February 21, 2011. http://mccannandlyttle.com/newspaper_articles/canal-mass-murder-trial-delayed-by-surprise-firing-of-lawyer/.

Arabic interpreter shortage delays trial for a year. Empowerlingua, January 26, 2011. http://blog.empowerlingua.co.uk/index.asp?post=145.

The Shafia case has attained such notoriety that it already has its page in Wikipedia. There are also some posts on YouTube that are shocking for their presumption of guilt and their eagerness to assume it was an honour killing.

Image: An Expert Court Interpreter ‘listening to the people on both sides of her’ and taking notes. From www. Flckr.com, http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2729/4203086115_5c317b5478.jpg.

The Babel Paradoxes

This year’s volume of Babel, the venerable research journal of the International Federation of Translators, starts off with an intriguing and learned article by Caroline Disler of Toronto about the Babel legend. The best-known version by far is the one in the Old Testament. In case you don’t remember it exactly or don’t have a Bible to hand, here’s Caroline’s quotation of it.

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’
So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth… (Genesis II:9)

As Caroline comments, “It is a brief uncomplicated tale, surprisingly short for the widespread influence it has had in Western culture.”

Nevertheless, it leads to several paradoxes. The first concerns the familiar English geographical name Babel.

“The Hebrew ’original’ bavel occurs over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible. With very rare exception, all the other occurrences of bavel in most English Bibles is rendered by ‘Babylon’, awe-inspiring capital of long-time enemies of the ancient Hebrews… In short, the customary English equivalent for the Hebrew bavel is ‘Babylon’. stemming from the Greek Babylon. That the English translators chose not to follow this convention only in Genesis II:9 remains a mystery.”

Actually not only the English translators but translators into other languages as well. Whatever it was made the translators do that, to me the effect is clear. By using a ‘fictitious’ name and avoiding the name of a real city, they kept the story in the realm of allegory instead of history.

Another surprise is the extent of other ancient versions of the story. One of them is the following.

“The biblical story… was not created ex nihilo. A number of earlier traditions that were committed to writing well before Babel have in all likelihood informed our narrative. Despite widespread debate, most scholars ascribe the date of composition of Genesis to the first half of the first millennium BCE… The Sumerian epic of Enmarkar and the Lord of Aratta describes the conflicts between Enmarkar, legendary king of the ancient city of Uruk (see image), and the unnamed ruler of Aratta. Although the available tablets date from around 2000 BCE, the epic itself was most likely composed centuries earlier… the extant tablets include a passage that bears startling similarities to some themes in the Babel narrative.”

Here’s an extract:

Man had no rival…
The whole universe, the people in unison,
To Enlis in one tongue they spoke…
Enki, the lord of wisdom, the leader of the gods,
Changed the speech in their mouths,
Set up contention into it,
Into the speech of man that until then had been one.

There’s also an Egyptian version in which the god Thoth is addressed as the one “who made different the tongue of one country from another.” Caroline comments, “It is intriguing to observe that divine agency in the differentiation of language appears both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt long before the biblical story of Babel was composed.”

After so much that’s of interest, where I nevertheless part company with Caroline is when she says that

“…we ourselves, as translators, must be prone to a certain disquieting hubris in order to ‘reverse God’s act’ – or, if one prefers, in order to claim to understand the meaning of a source message so well that we presume to [re?)produce it in another language.”

Where’s the hubris? To pursue the allegory, it was that same Lord who both fractured the single language at Babel and who endowed Man with the faculty of translating between the pieces. He did so along with the ability of each individual to learn and use more than one language. If He did it before Babel or concurrently, than He must have known that the ‘confusion’ He was introducing could only slow down communication by its inconvenience, not prevent it. If he did it after Babel, perhaps He relented. Either way, Man did not “reverse God’s act”, God did. For translating was not devised by Man – and here I step outside the allegory for a moment – it evolved along with multilingualism, and the ground was prepared perhaps even earlier in the form of a more general human or pre-human multifunctioning – the ability of an individual to do anything in more ways than one and to convert between them.

Nevertheless, Caroline provides us with another apt quotation that perhaps explains hubris, though it also leads to another paradox. She cites a translator known as ‘the grandson of Sirach’ who “sometime after 132 BCE” translated the biblical Book of Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew to Greek, and who apologised as follows for the shortcomings:

“You are invited… to be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent labour in translating, we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this book,… the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.”

Yet that didn’t prevent the grandson of Sirach from doing his translation and thinking it worth ‘publishing.’ And there’s the paradox in all translation: it’s never perfect, yet we still do it and use it. The solution to the paradox, as with many paradoxes, is a matter of semantics. The term translation is often used in a way that confuses usable translation with perfect translation and leads – as the French linguist Georges Mounin concluded long ago – to the paradoxical assertion that ‘translation is impossible’ when it’s being done all the time around us. There’s an Arabic proverb that runs al-’ismah lillâhi wahdah, which means ’Perfection belongs to God alone’; so He bestowed on Man translation as we know it with all its imperfections, and told Man to go forth and communicate.

References
Caroline Disler. Before Babel: in memoriam Daniel Simeoni and Brian Peckham. Babel 57:1, 1-14.

Babel is published for the International Federation of Translators by John Benjamins, www.benjamins.com.

The Bible quotation is from the New Revised Standard Version. Although the NRSV was published in 1989 and in the United States, it can be seen that its English is pretty archaic and full of translationese.

Samuel Noah Kramer. The ‘Babel of Tongues’: a Sumerian version. Journal of the American Oriental Society 88(1968):1.108-11.

Georges Mounin. Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Image: http://www.minacious.org

Old Translators Never Die...

...they simply fade away.

There are many mentions in this blog of how young humans can be when they start to translate, but how old can they get before they lose the power? There's only been one post that suggests an answer to the latter question, the one about the Spanish lady in her seventies who spontaneously interpreted for another guest at a dinner. (To find it, enter "age limit" with the quotation marks in the Search box on the right.)

When I was in my fifties, I met a Professional Translator in Toronto who was in his eighties and still working. I expressed surprise that he'd gone on for so long. He replied, "One of the good things about translation is that you can go on doing it to an advanced age."

I've known one or two conference interpreters who were still working in their seventies, but none who was older. However, that's not necessarily an indication for written translation, because interpreting is much more high speed; and furthermore it's of the nature of a performing art with the stress that playing to a public imposes. Both the professional associations I belong to have a category for 'retired' or 'senior' members, but that doesn't tell us how many of them have stopped translating entirely. In any case, the limit for Professional Translators may not be the same as for Natural and Native Translators.

One piece of data I am sure of, though. This week I'll be 82 myself. I long ago gave up conference interpreting, but I still do some community interpreting and I translate. I have to thank many people for helping me get so far, but first of all my parents, for bequeathing me their genes and arranging for me to be born under the sign Gemini, which is an ideal sign for translators. I once read in a horoscope book that the ideal careers for Geminis included interpreter and international telephone operator, and I've been both. Of course my parents also did a lot of other things for me.

This week I'll again be interpreting for the Englishman who's stricken with dementia in a Spanish coastal resort. (For the earlier posts about him, enter Cullera in the Search box on the right). But not medical interpreting. This time I'll be a Community Native Interpreter between his wife and the local social services.

This week I'll still be translating and certifying documents for Spanish doctors who are going to work or study in Canada. This is because the Canadian medical authorities won't accept translations done by a Spanish official translator; they have to be done by a Canadian one. It's tit for tat really, because the Spanish authorities and courts will only accept translations by a Spanish sworn interpreter. This widespread international non-recognition is something the International Federation of Translators should campaign against. However, it's a turf conflict that only affects Professional Translators, so no more about it here.

Changes in Bilingualism and Translating: Japan vs. the UK

Over at The Liaison Interpreter, Lionel Dersot reports as a Professional Expert Interpreter on a recent development concerning interpreters and 'facilitators' in Japanese industries.

"There are so many employees able to very well function in-house as liaison interpreters that once you get a foot inside, you understand the potential market is even thinner than your previous hypothesis. A new generation of internationally raised children of international couples have brought perfectly fluent employees who at various echelons can work without interpreting, or can help as interpreters on the spot. The few examples I see are probably of the natural interpreter types."

I would say, rather, that by this time they're probably Native Interpreters who've learnt what's required of them by seeing other interpreters at work in their industries. There's nothing new about in-house interpreters in large Japanese organisations. The first Professional Japanese Interpreter I ever met, Sen Nishiyama, 30 years ago, worked for Sony. However, Lionel is talking about "a new generation," and traces its advent back to an increase in bilingualism due to "internationally raised children of international couples." The Natural Translation Hypothesis (NTH) predicts 'the more bilingual children, the more Natural Translators'; and a corollary is that the more Natural Translators there are, the larger the pool from which exposure to more advanced translating activities can develop Native Translators. Unlike Expert Translators, whose training should make them versatile, the full translating competence of Native Translators is likely to be restricted to their own field of activity, in this case Japanese corporations. Thus, Lionel says,

"They may lack something, being insiders and part of the inner ecosystem of the corporation. They are part of the inner drama which is the unique view of the world projected from the inside by each entity. Each entity creates its own world view that shuns the possibility that there are other, viable world views."

So an increase in the bilingual population leads to an increase in the number of Native Translators, and from these the trainee Expert Interpreters can be recruited, provided the necessary training resources – courses, mentors, placements – are available. It follows that in countries where adequate training is offered, the availability of Expert Interpreters is indirectly symptomatic of the state of bilingualism.

Now let's turn the argument around and look at an area where bilingualism is decreasing. As an ardent reader of The Linguist, I see constant complaints about the decline of foreign languages in British secondary schools and universities since they ceased to be compulsory for the school leaving certificate (GCSEs). This doesn't necessarily signal an overall reduction in the number of bilinguals in the country especially since there are many members of immigrant families who speak, and speak fluently, the languages of their countries of origin as well as English. But most of the immigrant languages, from Punjabi to Jamaican, are not among those required for working in international organisations and businesses, and they are not the ones traditionally taught in UK schools.

Now then, NTH would predict negatively that 'fewer bilinguals mean fewer Natural Translators, and consequently fewer Native Translators and a smaller pool from which to train Expert Translators.' And that seems to be what's happening in the UK. Amanda Page, writing about the shortage of English literary translators, says,

"The decline in the study of languages at secondary school, coupled with the closing of many university language departments, is also having a profound effect on the profession. In the space of just 40 years, first Latin, and then many modern languages, began to be dropped from state schools. The longstanding university entrance requirement of a basic classical and a modern language ended when O-levels were replaced by GCSEs, and the situation got dramatically worse when the Government ended compulsory language learning at Key Stage 4 [in the secondary school syllabus]."

In the case of literary translators, the decline is doubly serious because the traditional secondary school language courses included a large dose of foreign literature:

"Removing literature as a necessary component of... language courses... is surely counter-intelligent... the literary translator needs a cultural understanding of the text."

I've always found it ironic that, while German bombs were raining down horror on London during the Blitz in World War II, we grammar school pupils in a London suburb were still being made to read snippets of German literature from the Minnesingers to Stefan George and Thomas Mann. But I've never regretted it, nor the French and Latin literature we tasted.

The effect just described is not, however, being felt only in the stratosphere of literature. At a more down-to-earth and better paying level, the European Commission in Brussels is now experiencing a shortage of native English Expert Translators, who are needed to maintain the standard of English required for its official publications. Rosie Morfey explains,

"The translation services are finding it difficult to recruit to recruit sufficient numbers of skilled linguists working into English. With falling numbers studying modern languages at British universities... or limiting themselves to one foreign language, there are fewer and fewer people who can offer the required range of language skills."

To sum it up, here's a derived hypothesis from NTH: more bilinguals mean more translators at all levels, and conversely more translators are symptomatic of more bilinguals. Vice versa, fewer bilinguals, etc...

Photo: "Momoko Gill, a young, Japanese-British woman who was finishing high school in Santa Barbara, California. She told me she was born in England and spent her first five years there, then ten years in Japan, before three in Santa Barbara. She grew up speaking both English and Japanese. Her eloquent articulation of interest, plus persistence, made her my eventual choice. She had no interpreting experience, but she was a serious jazz drummer and basketball player and I thought those backgrounds were good for this line of work." — Sam Stephenson. The “line of work” was conducting interviews for research on a famous photo-journalist.

References
Lionel Dersot. Liquefaction. The Liaison Interpreter, May 6, 2011.
http://japaninterpreter.blogspot.com/.

Amanda Hopkinson, Changing the page. The Linguist, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 8-9, 2010.

Rosie Morfey. Scouting for talent. The Linguist, vol. 49, no. 1, p. 24, 2010. Incidentally, Rosie herself translates at the European Commission from French, Swedish, Danish, German, Estonian and Hungarian into English.

The Linguist is the bi-monthly magazine of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, www.iol.org.uk.

Sam Stephenson. Q&A with Momoko Gill. Jazz Loft Project Blog, May 2011. http://www.jazzloftproject.org/blog/guest-bloggers/qa-with-momoko-gill.