Mentors and Apprentices

Over at his blog The Liaison Intepreter, Lionel Dersot describes a beginner he met recently:

He is Japanese. He is excellent at French, and communication, that is, he speaks naturally, and fast, and understands a great deal about everything. Incidentally, he spent years as a barman in a café back there [in France?]. He is new to translation and interpretation. He has been working part-time as a kind of assistant for a veteran terp/translator.

This is a reminder of an alternative route for progressing from Native to Expert Translator – an alternative, that is, to taking formal courses. The definition of Expert Translator on this blog (enter essential definitions in the Search box on the right) expressly recognises mentorship as that alternative. Another word for it is apprenticeship, which of course is very old.

It's not peculiar to translation, though other professions have it better organised. My brother was an engineer. He began his career when he was 16 as an apprentice in a large firm of manufacturing engineers in England. At the same time he went to night classes, and he finished up as a partner in a famous firm of consulting engineers. He didn't have a university degree, but he had a series of professional qualifications obtained by examination from the Institution of Structural Engineers. He told me that times had changed in his profession, however, and that nowadays engineers at his level were expected to have a degree, especially since the UK joined the European Union and the British norms had to adapt to it. There were pros and cons. On the one hand, the university graduates were well prepared on the theoretical side; but on the other hand they lacked practical experience and judgement and still needed another kind of 'apprenticeship' before they became full operative and responsible.

Administrative and technical translating, at least in the more 'developed' countries, has been going the same way over the past 50 years. Here's an example. When I started teaching in the 1960s, the executives at the Translation Bureau of the Government of Canada looked down politely on a university degree in translation and didn't consider it a worthwhile qualification. (According to Sarah Dillon, see References below, the attitude persists in some quarters.) To understand them, one must recall that they themselves came from a generation that started in translation when such degrees were a novelty and only available in very few places. Instead, the Bureau recruited beginners by its own examination and placed them at the lowest rank in the service (TR1). There they were put to work under an experienced senior revisor (TR3 level) who, if he or she acquitted the role conscientiously, acted as a mentor. And nowadays? Like all the large employers of translators in Canada, the Translation Bureau asks for a degree.

Elsewhere, there are now 19 universities in Spain alone that offer translation licenciaturas (roughly equivalent to Honours BAs).

Still, from the developmental viewpoint, the one-on-one mentorship and the apprenticeship experience remain valid forms of training for the few who can find an available mentor or employer, and it's a pity the translation profession doesn't organise it better. The truth is, most professional translators don't want to lose time on it. Yet a university student whom I took on as a summer assistant once said to me, "I've learnt as much in the past month as in the whole year in this school." Doubtless an exaggeration, but...

References
Sarah Dillon. Apprenticeships for translators. There's Something About Translation blog, 2011. Click here.

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'Apprenticeship programs put learners under the direct supervision of the experienced'. Source: Apprenticeship Programs for Education in Washington.

Volunteer Native Interpreters in Cincinnati

This report has just come in from Cincinnati, Ohio, in the heart of the American Midwest.

It’s crunch time for the language volunteers of the 2012 World Choir Games.

Bob Stevie, 65, of White Oak and president of the Cincinnati USA Sister City Association, began recruiting volunteers fluent in foreign languages a year ago. He started with three volunteers, and largely with the help of the University of Cincinnati’s international community, he has built a group of 60 leaders. Each leader, specializing in specific languages and dialects, has received a list of volunteers that they must then interview to make sure their workers are actually fluent.

About 30 volunteer translators met last week in a Cincinnati Park Board office to hammer out plans for serving the melting pot of international choirs. They represented half of the volunteer team leaders who are meeting weekly to coordinate myriad details. Putting together a master plan for these teams of translators – who will assist international choirs as they rehearse and compete, help them find Downtown restaurants, and get them to their events on time – has been complex.
During the meeting, there were signs of the urgency of their task. Team leaders were waiting for the final list of 352 choirs – half of them international – that will descend upon Cincinnati starting on July 4. Until they received that list, they couldn’t coordinate a master schedule for their volunteer workers.

Rebecca Quinones of Loveland is helping to coordinate all of the languages.
“Our biggest issue is just the number of choirs we have coming, and making sure all are accounted for and that we don’t let anyone fall through the cracks,” she said. “We’re working kind of desperately right now.”

A melting pot of languages
Introducing themselves around the table, the volunteer language coordinators were fluent in (besides English), Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Latvian, Dutch, Japanese, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Swahili and Arabic.

A second weekly meeting with different leaders includes a host of Chinese speakers of several dialects, as well as those overseeing Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Bosnian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romania, Farsi, Kazakh, Filipino Tagalog, Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese translators.

They are prepared to cover 27 languages, and possibly more if the need arises, said Stevie. On their table, a large map of China pinpointed the provinces representing 60-70 Chinese choirs that are expected.

Each leader voices a concern. Volunteer Hanif Qureshi, a police officer from India working on his Ph.D. at UC, says he needs to know the regions that the three choirs from India are from. “The region will say which language they speak. They will not all speak Hindi,” he said.

The Russian committee is still “a work in progress.” There are not enough native Latvian speakers locally to cover the need. There is just one Japanese choir, but 13 volunteers to cover it.

In contrast, only about a dozen people have been found who speak Indonesian, and more than 900 Indonesian singers in 20 choirs are expected. Indonesia is a country where up to 700 different languages are spoken. Fortunately, said Stevie, many speak English.

Stevie instructs the group that they must all be familiar with Downtown streets.
“You must be comfortable taking people from Music Hall to Duke Energy Center. You must know where there are restrooms,” he said. “It’s got to run on time. We’ve got to get our choirs to the right place at the right time.”

Comments
1. This is a typical case where the number (27) and nature of the languages and the type of organisation responsible would make it unthinkable to employ professional interpreters, even if they could be found in the Cincinnati area.

2. It's a large-scale operation. Just the group leaders number 60. This is evidence - if more evidence were needed - that translating is not an accomplishment of the exceptionally endowed but is commonplace in bilinguals, at any rate in well-educated ones.

3. Universities, even those that have no translation programme, are a good source for recruiting Native Translators and Interpreters, because nowadays they all have many bilingual foreign students.

4. The volunteers will be functioning as liaison interpreters. As usual in liaison interpreting, they will have to do more than just translate (they must be "familiar with downtown streets", etc.)

5. The volunteers may not be Expert Interpreters, but they are tested for language fluency and are well organised.

6. They can count on a lot of goodwill and tolerance on the part of their 'clients'.

7. There's a convergence that illustrates the parallel between translators and musicians that was the subject of the post of May 10. The interpreters are Native Translators and the choristers are, for the most part, Native Singers.

References
Janelle Gelfand. Choir Games translators talking details. Cincinnati.com, June 10, 2012. Click here.

The website of the World Choir Games, "the largest choral competition in the world", is here.

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World Choir Games 2010. Source: ChoralNet.

The Story of Doktor Dollmann

I told this story at Forlì, but I'll repeat it here for a wider audience because it follows appropriately on the post about note-taking.

It comes from the memoirs of one of Hitler's interpreters, Eugen Dollmann, who was his principal Italian interpreter. Dollmann's performance on his first assignment was far from auspicious, but the story has a happy ending – if working for Hitler can be called 'happy'.

In brief, it happened this way. Hitler had come to Italy to visit Mussolini and was to address a meeting of Italian fascist youth. The man who was to interpret for him fell ill suddenly, and the German embassy in Rome was faced with finding a last-minute substitute. So they turned to Dollmann, a German who had been living in Rome for several years and who was known to speak Italian fluently. He was a student of Italian history and art; however, he was not an interpreter. He had neither training nor experience. But he couldn't turn down an assignment for the Führer.

So Dollmann was introduced to Hitler, the youth meeting took place, and at the end of it Hitler made one of his bombastic speeches. Then it was Dollmann's turn. But poor Dollmann, who had no notes to fall back on, couldn't remember a word of what Hitler had said. So in a panic he did what others have done in such a situation: he 'winged it', as interpreters say. He concocted a speech of his own in Italian in the same style as Hitler's, and delivered it with as much conviction as he could muster. At the end of it, to Dollmann's surprise and relief, the young fascists applauded and cheered wildly.

So Dollmann thought his ordeal was over, but no. To his dismay, he was told he would be driving back in Hitler's own car. He got in, wondering whether Hitler realised what had happened, and after a while, sure enough, the Führer said to him sternly, "Herr Doktor, it seems to me you didn't say quite what I said." Dollmann's heart sank into his boots. And then Hitler continued, "But never mind. They liked it."

Not only was that an end to the incident, but Dollman and Hitler hit it off and Dollman, by then an SS officer, continued to interpret for the Führer and Mussolini until the end of the war. By that time, we may suppose, he'd progressed from Native to Expert Interpreter. He even carried out diplomatic missions in Rome. An American who had dealings with him called him "a slippery customer." Not only that, but like Hitler's English interpreter Paul Schmidt (for more, enter schmidt in the Search Box on the right), he escaped prosecution and survived to write his memoirs, which have been an invaluable source for historians.

The story reminds me of what a cynical old conference interpreter once told me early on in my career. He said:

"The worst thing an interpreter can do is to say nothing. Then everybody knows at once that things have gone wrong. If you keep talking but say something the speaker didn't say, only bilingual listeners will notice it. Make it up if necessary. But if you do that, make sure it's something the speaker might have said. Then there's a good chance nobody will notice."

References
Eugen Dollmann. The Interpreter: Memoirs of Doktor Eugen Dollmann. Translated from German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. London: Hutchinson, 1967.
The above version of the story is a paraphrase from memory, because I don't have my copy of the book with me in Valencia.

Robert Katz. The talented Doktor Dollmann. TheBoot.it: Robert Katz's History of Modern Italy. Originally published in 1967. Click here.

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Dollmann in SS uniform with Hitler. Source: Il Bracciale di Sterline.

Expert Interpreters and Notepads

While I was away, Barbara Jasinska commented from Poland on the post with the photo of two diplomatic interpreters (April 22):

"Having a notepad doesn't make you a professional interpreter. Some amateurs will use it as well because it's simply practical."

She has a point. In the set-up shown in the photo, however, it's more than just a notepad. There we have two interpreters, both with notepads of the right size at the ready and both seated in the correct position. The notepads are an indication of expertise but not the only one.

I agree that some Advanced Native Interpreters (the ones Barbara calls 'amateurs') know how to take notes. In my experience, it's because they've already learnt note-taking for some other purpose. The first time I ever had to do long consecutive in public, it was of a speech at a banquet. I'd had no interpretation training, yet I intuitively had the good sense to make some notes on the only 'pad' available, which was the back of the menu. How was it that I knew to do it and how to do it? It was because I'd had a long training in summarising, starting with précis-writing at school, which was a standard exercise in my time, and then of note-taking at lectures at university. One of my best consecutive interpreting students – he's now a senior United Nations official in Geneva – had previously acquired experience as the secretary at meetings. Neither he nor I started out using a system of symbols such as Rozan's; that came later, and then only partially. In short, note-taking is part of a complete education for working life in our society, and "summary/précis writing is a useful skill for everyone."

On the other hand, I've seen Native Interpreters stumble over even very short consecutive passages because they hadn't been told to take notes or hadn't come along with the right equipment. ('The right equipment' means a flip-over shorthand secretary's pad and two good pens because, in a long meeting, one may give out.) It's particularly embarrassing when inexperienced court interpreters have difficulty remembering names, numbers, etc.; those are the first things they should note. And most students in interpreter training courses at university or elsewhere need some instruction and exercises in note-taking, bearing in mind that the translation for conferences should be shorter than the source. Yet I've also witnessed a 15-year-old untrained schoolgirl produce a stunning expert performance at a simulated meeting.

Consideration of note-taking leads to some deep questions. On the one hand there's the outward notation for it: the abbreviations, symbols, speedwords, etc. On the other hand, hidden behind that, there's the human mental ability to select and extract information, to synthesise it and to summarise. We schoolchildren already needed the last for our précis exercises; grown academics need it for writing abstracts; and so do the bilingual Précis Writers at the United Nations meetings in New York, who don't share the high profile of their interpreter colleagues but who are likewise highly skilled Expert Translators.

Thank you, Barbara, for the comment.

Reference
Interpreting notes. Wikipedia. Click here.

United Nations Language and Comunications Programme Learning Service, OHRM. Summary and précis writing, Course Code E4W45/1.

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From the blog Travels without my spaniel. Click here.

Back from Forlì

I'm back from the Forlì conference, having spent a few days on the way in the beautiful old city of Bologna. Apart from its buildings - we visited three churches each the size of a cathedral - it boasts the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088. At 4:05 am on May 20 we were wakened by the first of the two earthquakes that have hit the region. But the tremor only lasted a matter of seconds, the hotel shook but settled back to stability, so we went to sleep again and only learnt about the damage elsewhere the next morning. Fortunately for us and for the city, the epicentre was some distance away (Bologna is a province as well as a city) and in the city itself life went on as usual.

The conference gave great satisfaction. It wasn't large (some 60 participants) but they came from 18 countries, so it was truly international. As its chief organiser, Rachele Antonini, says in a post-conference email:

"I think that having a conference where we can all present and discuss our research in this field without being relegated in sessions that have little to do with our work was something that we all enjoyed and treasured, and certainly an experience to be repeated."

For me, it was a particular pleasure to meet some of the readers of this blog in person.

That said, it's also noticeable that the spread was far from even. Of the 60 participants, all but six were from Europe. That's easily explained, of course, by logistics and cost. Low-cost airlines have revolutionised travel within Europe. There are days when you can fly from Valencia to Bologna for 10 euros plus tax! For people from afar, perhaps the future lies in streaming conferences by internet - but then we wouldn't have the pleasure of meeting like-minded people in person.

And the topics of the papers likewise showed an uneven distribution. We can't yet say that non-professional translation studies are in fashion, but they have their own fashions. One is language brokering, whose relative popularity has been, as Marjorie Faulstich Orellana showed in her paper, mainly due to people from other disciplines like sociology. There were 10 papers on child language brokering (CLB). Only one, a 'spin-off' to quote its author, was on language brokering by adults; although there were one or two others that might be classed with it even if they didn't use the term. In part the imbalance in this case can be attributed to the fact that the Forlì people have their own CLB research project, called In medio PUER(I), and that “CLB is extremely common among all the linguistic groups living in Emilia Romagna” (the region around Forlì).

Another prolific subfield was crowdsourcing, especially for subtitling videos and films (aka fansubbing). There were eight papers on this theme. The activity itself is now very widespread.

In contrast, some equally important fields were under-represented. Religious interpreting and translating brought only two papers. And there was only a single paper - a historical one at that - about military interpreting, something that was surprising given all that is known about the interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully these imbalances will be redressed in future conferences.

Anyway, there was a lot to be learnt at this pioneer meeting and some of it will be taken up here in coming posts.

Terms
The title of the conference was non-professional interpreting and translation. This roughly corresponds to natural translation in its broad sense, i.e. the translating done by people who have had no specific training for it. (For the narrower sense, enter essential definitions in the Search box.) In fact natural translation was widely used in the broad sense in the papers, so it seems to be established.

Child language brokering. This term, along with its abbreviation CLB, was also so much used that it's clear it's become established. That's a good thing because it leaves an earlier version of it, language brokering without the child, free for a broader meaning that also covers the language brokering done by teenagers and adults.

References
Rachele Antonini. The study of child language brokering: Past, current and emerging research. mediAzioni 10, 2010. Click here for the text.

The conference programme is still available here.

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The Neptune fountain, Bologna. Source: Wikipedia.

Natural Translators and Musicians

When I look for other phenomena in human mental development that show some similarity to translation, music comes to mind.

Music is universal; translating is almost so.

If one admits that culturally different 'musics' (Western European, Chinese, classical and jazz, etc.) are different musical 'languages', then it's possible to be multi-musical as well as multilingual, and even both at the same time.

Both musical and translating ability start so young that one is driven to suspect there is something inherited which facilitates them.

"Babies love the patterns and rhythms of songs. And even young babies can recognize specific melodies once they've heard them...
Young children's developing brains are equipped to learn music. Most four- and five-lyear-olds enjoy making music and can learn the basics of some instruments”

Young children’s developing brains are likewise equipped to learn two or more languages. Once they’ve done that, they can translate between them and most of them enjoy doing so.

Children who learn an instrument, at least in Western societies, soon start to read music; that is to say, they learn to convert between sounds and graphemes. Indeed written instrumental music has its own internal form of transcoding, called ‘transposing’, when the notes aren’t played or sung as they are written.

Children who have learnt to read and write can convert from language graphemes to sounds and vice versa and can translate between both forms.

At the opposite, most developed end of the scale, there are the Experts: opera singers, orchestra players, etc. The Experts may be, but aren’t necessarily, Professionals. My old Ottawa colleague Louis Kelly is an Expert Translator; he’s also an Expert flautist - but not a professional. He’s happy to perform in the large community of ‘amateur musicians’.

And in between there’s a great mass of Native Musicians: people, adults as well as children, who ‘pick up’ music without instruction. In fact most people can sing songs just from having heard them; and my friend Les plays the organ 'from ear' without ever having been taught the keyboard. Like the Native Translators who provide the Language Brokers, for instance.

Admittedly the comparison mustn’t be pushed too far. It would also be possible to draw up a list of the differences between the two. Nevertheless, there’s a progression in both of them from the spontaneous and untrained - the Natural - to the Expert and the Professional, with many Natives in between.

My conclusion is that translating is not so special. Its development is typical of many superficially unrelated human abilities and competences. Football would be another. I only reached Beginner Native Player level at it, but I enjoyed playing along with the Advanced Native Players at school; and I once translated a multimillion-euro contract for the transfer of a Professional Expert.

Reference
Diana Bales. Building Baby's Brain: The Role of Music. Athens, GA: University of Georgia, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, 1998. Click here for a summary.

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Children playing violin at Suzuki Institute, Ithaca NY.
Source: Wikipedia Commons

Forlì Conference

First International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation
17-19 May 2012 at Forlì, near Bologna, Italy.

The full programme is now online. This blog features in it.
To see it, click here.