Church Interpreting and The Philosopher’s Stone

This is a guest post by Jonathan Downie of Edinburgh. Jonathan is a Professional Conference Interpreter who also does interpreting in churches. He is a postgradúate student of Heriot-Watt University, and he was responsible for coordinating the church interpreting sessions at the NPIT1 and NPIT2 conferences. So he’s an expert on it and it’s a privilege to have this contribution from him.
Other relevant guest posts welcome.

It’s a bit odd, if you really think about it. The (now thankfully outmoded) tradition for training conference interpreters is to make them work really hard to make their work go unnoticed. Impartiality, completeness and even appeals to secrecy mean that the archetypal conference interpreter is one who lets you pretend that they don’t exist. The philosopher’s stone of interpreting is to be so smooth and clean that clients can lie back and imagine that they are actually listening to a speech produced in their language.

Walk round the corner from the conference hall to the local international church and the picture changes completely. Across four continents, nine countries, and numerous denominations, research in church interpreting is beginning to paint a picture of a kind of interpreting that is visible, powerful and unavoidably changes the context in which it appears.

Take the work of Cécile Vigouroux on interpreting in a church in South Africa. Here the interpreting is not only carried out sentence-by-sentence on-stage but it functions as a symbol (perhaps only a symbol, go read her article) of the openness of the church to the English-speakers in the surrounding community. Suddenly, the existence of interpreting has turned a church that would otherwise be labelled an immigrant church into a fully-fledged member of the local church community.

Then there’s the work of Sari Hokkanen. A conference interpreter by trade, her autoethnography of church interpreting not only shows how this practice blows giant holes in our nice neat classifications of interpreted events but it puts paid to the idea that neutrality and impartiality are always the keystones of interpreting. At the end of May 2014, at the NPIT2 conference in Germersheim, Germany, she even dared to talk about crying in the booth and being personally affected by the material she was interpreting. It turns out that interpreters are human and have feelings too. Who knew?

Jill Karlik, who should probably be recognised as the mother of church interpreting research, offers an equally insightful datum. One of her respondents felt that interpreters were so important in one church in Gambia, that he deemed one his co-preacher. Here we have stakeholders actually asking for interpreters to partner with them in the production of a text. This sense of partnership might explain why Hayne Shin found so many interpreting users in churches in Korea who wanted interpreters to be Christians before they sat in the booth.

Now, it is highly possible to dismiss all this work as inconsequential. Yes, the majority of church interpreters might be natural interpreters. Yes, it seems to be more common than anyone previously thought but it is still marginal, right? I am sure most of these arguments have been applied to research on other forms of natural interpreting too. It is much easier to dismiss such work than learn from it.

Perhaps this is a case where the professionals can learn from the naturals. In church interpreting, there is no way to pretend that interpreting can or should make itself invisible. There is an admission by everyone involved that a church service with interpreting is completely different to one without it. Rather than trying to erase this difference, many churches seem to want to celebrate it and use interpreting to the full. I have personally visited a church where interpreting is given pride of place in the constitution and is seen as a core activity.

From this flows a whole new way of working with interpreters. Partnership rules the day there. Preachers interrupt their own sermons to congratulate interpreters on their work. They exploit the potential of having two people on-stage and discuss how to better communicate across cultures with interpreters off-stage. As I said, we have a lot to learn, even and especially from people who have never received training in how to interpret. Maybe it’s our values that need to be realigned, not theirs.


References
Jonathan Downie’s business address is Integrity Languages, integritylanguages.wordpress.com.

Sari Hokkanen. Interpreting through tears: Religious experience, emotion and simultaneous interpreting. Paper to the Second International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, Germersheim, 2014.

Jill Karlik. “Natural” interpreting in a group of Gambian churches: Frames of reference. Paper to the Second International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, Germersheim, 2014.

Hayne Shin. User-expectations on the role and qualities of church interpreters: Consecutive and simultaneous interpreting in Korean churches. Paper to the Second International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, Germersheim, 2014.

Cécile B. Vigouroux. Double-mouthed discourse: interpreting, framing, and participant roles. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14:3.341-369, 2010. Available for downloading from academia.edu.

Image
Which is the interpreter, which the preacher? It was at a service like this in Cameroon that I first encountered church interpreting myself. − BH
Source: stchronicle.wordpress.com

NPIT flash!

It was decided, by drawing out of a hat at the conclusion of NPIT2 in Germersheim last weekend - see previous post - that NPIT3 will be held in Zurich in 2016, and NPIT4 in South Africa (at Cape Town or Stellenbosch) two years later.

It looks like the adventure that started at Forli in 2012 is gong worldwide. As I wrote in The Importance of Natural Translation, a paradigm is determined not only by its methodology but also by its object of study. Consequently a new paradigm is emerging in Translation Studies.

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.

Image
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.