2015 Competition for Child Translators

On Christmas Day I was listening to a concert from Brussels on TV. One of the works was a beautifully performed Bach double violin concerto. Of the soloists, one was a young woman, young but adult. The other was a girl who was just as accomplished as her companion but who looked no older than twelve. A mere child, but gifted; a musical genius. She started me thinking about child translators.

It's not necessary for a child to be 'exceptionally gifted' to learn to play the violin. Thanks to Shinichi Suzuki and other music teachers, thousands of ordinary children do it every year. All they need is ten fingers, a perception of musical pitch and the mysterious delight in melody and rhythm which almost all children are born with worldwide. Music, for all its artificial elaborateness in pieces like the Bach concerto, is basically natural. Most of the chldren give up the violin after a while, but the basics of music that they have acquired on the way stay with them for life. Some of them persist, however; and a select few who really are exceptionally gifted reach the level of the Brussels soloist and we class them as geniuses.

Translating still awaits its Suzuki. But we know, especially from the studies of child language brokers, that child natural translators abound. All they need is to be bilingual. Yet the example of music tells us that if there are so many child translators who are not exceptionally gifted, then there should be a select few geniuses at the top of the pyramid who are, because it's a hierarchy to which all natural abilities conform. Can we find them?

At that point I had an idea for a first step. Here it is.


.........................Preliminary Announcement.....................

2015 Translatology Competition for Child Translators
-------------------------under 12 years old----------------------


First prize 400 euro
Second prize 200 euro
Third prize 100 euro

Language combination for 2015: Spanish to English
Other combinations in future years

The terms and texts of the competition will be announced in January.

.....................................................................................


Now nothing remains for 2014 but to wish my 195 Followers and all my other readers

Young Interpreters: a Terminology Proposal

The December issue of Young Interpreters Newsletter has arrived with its usual roundup of good news from the schools that are members of the Young Interpreters Scheme (YI). YI, in case you don't already know, is a unique organisation sponsored by a British education authority for encouraging bilingual pupils to use their interpreting ability to help fellow students, school staff and other less advantaged members of their communities. Their ability, at least when they start, is largely natural; and it's important to note that they are not 'exceptionally gifted' children. Bilingualism and the translation ability that goes with it are already a fact of everyday life in multicultural Britain. (For more about YI, enter yi in the Search box on the right.)

More important, though, than the current news is the link in the middle of the Newsletter to YI's general list of does and don'ts for using children. The topic has been touched on before on this blog but the YI treatment is more complete and has official backing.

What the YI interpreters do is a form of language brokering. I've never liked the term language broker, because of its commercial connotation (as in insurance broker). But it's been in use now for at least 20 years, so we're stuck with it. However, it became apparent some time ago that it was inadequate with respect to the age of the interpreters. The people who coined it meant it to apply to children. Yet the functions of language broker don't end at such an early age. A great deal of it is done by adults for their families and acquaintances – and even for their children. A child who accompanies an adult family member to the doctor's to interpret is a language broker, but so is an adult who accompanies his or her child. So it has become customary in recent years to qualify the term in order to preserve the original intent, and to speak of child language brokers.

So far so good. But child is still a vague age indicator and certainly doesn't cover all the YI interpreters, the older ones of whom – the ones in the secondary schools – could reasonably object to being called children. It's in order to be more precise therefore, though not overly so, that I propose the following scale of terms. They can be applied not only to language brokers but to child translators in general.

1. Infant translators / language brokers. Under five years old. There are certainly children who can do some translating at that age, but language brokering is unlikely. This isn't because of language but because of the knowledge of the world around that language brokers need. Nevertheless, we should allow for it.

2. Child translators / language brokers. From five to ten years old. This corresponds to the period of primary education in most education systems.

3. Adolescent (or ado-) translators / language brokers. From 11 to 18, corresponding to secondary education.

4. Adult translators / language brokers. 18 and over. This takes us beyond the originally intended scope of language broker, but it must, for the reason given above, be allowed for.

So now what to do do about the YI interpreters, whose ages span both 2 and 3 above? We might make up a compound like child and adolescent translators. But that's a mouthful. Instead I propose to take advantage of the correspondences with the school systems and speak of

5. School-age translators / language brokers, ie, from five to 17 years old, to cover both categories.

We'll see if it catches on.

Sources
Hampshire Count Council, EMTAS. Young Interpreters Newsletter, December 2014. To receive or contribute, contact Astrid Dinneen at astrid.dinneen@hants.gov.uk.

Lucy Tse (University of Southern California). Language brokering among Latino adolescents…. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 1995.

J. McQuillan and L. Tse. Child language brokering in linguistic minority communities. Language and Education, 1995.

Infant translators was used as early as 1978 by Harris and Sherwood in Translating as an innate skill, which is avaialable on academia.edu.

School age language brokering has been used, but only with limiting qualifiers such as high school age language brokers, as in:

Sarah Louise Telford. Language Brokering Among Latino Middle School Students…, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010, which also uses adult language brokering.

The same is true of school age translating.

Yet Another Bilingual Advantage

Ever since the explosive studies by Wallace Lambert and his collaborators at Montreal's McGill University in the 1960s, the tide has been turning in favour of bilingual education from childhood. (For an obit of Lambert, enter lambert in the Search box on the right.) Where I live, the discussion is no longer about whether children should learn two languages (half of them are Natural Bilinguals anyway in Spanish and Valencian) but whether they should be taught a third or even a fourth. It's true that in an officially bilingual jurisdiction like Canada or the Valencian Community we need to be on guard against research that fits too neatly into the current social and political agenda, but even so the trend is IMHO convincing. Bilingalism means more language and cultural flexibility, etc. From this year foreign languages are part of the primary school curriculum even in recalcitrant Britain.

Now comes a new twist.

"Researchers have found that bilingual children are able to concentrate better in the busy classroom environment than their monolingual peers. The research from Anglia Ruskin University [in the UK] found that 7- to 10-year olds who speak only one language were more negatively affected bu noise and were less able to keep their attention on a task when there other noises nearby. Published in Bilingualism, Language and Cognition, the study shows that the heightened performance of bilingual children is dependent on how well they know the two languages."

Sources
The Linguist, December 2014/January 2015, p. 5.

E. Peale and W. E. Lambert. The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs, General and Applied, vol. 76, no. 27, pp. 1-23. 1962.

Amanda Barton. Primary problem: how is compulsory language education shaping up on the ground? The Linguist, December 2014/January 2015, pp. 20-21.

Image
Anglia Ruskin University. It sprang from a school of art founded at Cambridge by the 19th-century artist and critic John Ruskin.

The Imitation Game: Back to Bletchley Park

The film The Imitation Game (IG) has reached the cinemas and film festvals in some countries. Elsewhere many newspapers have already carried reviews of it, so I need say no more about it as a film. In case you don't already know, it's a 'biopic' based on the life of British mathematician turned computer scientist turned cryptographer Alan Turing. The prevailing opinion rates it Oscar material. But I'm a historian (see my Profile on the right), and historical films are always more or less distant adaptations of history or biography, so they irk me.

The central backdrop to IG is the converted Victorian mansion at Bletchley Park (BP), north of London, that was bought and taken over by the UK Government Code and Cypher School just before the Second World War. Now it so happens, due to one of those fortunate coincidences which have enriched my life, that I spent a day touring BP only a few weeks ago and wrote two blog posts about it. To find them quickly, enter bletchley in the Search box on the right. It was not my intent to write a history of the place; for that, see Sources below. But my source and I are closer to the historical truth than IG. The film makes too much depend on the brilliant mind of one person so as to accentuate the tragedy of his demise. I sympathise with it as biography, because when I was young Britain was still living in the Dark Ages of its hypocrisy towards homosexuals. But there were upwards of 9,000 select bright people working at BP, including as many translators as cryptologists; not to mention the little band of Polish mathematicians who had prised out the initial reverse engineering of the German Enigma machine before the War began. Bill Tutte, for instance, a Cambridge chemistry graduate, deduced through mathematical analysis how another German encryption machine, the Lorenz, worked without ever having seen one. Although Turing had the fundamental idea that all mental operations convertible into binary coding were computable, he never actually built a computer himself. His first decryption machine, the Bombe, was an electro-mechanical device. The first real programmable computer, the Colossus in 1944, was the work of Tommy Flowers, son of a bricklayer and never went to university, and his fellow Post Office engineers. All this is not to diminish Turing's importance – he was the most influential thinker and team leader at BP – but onlybto put him in perspective. Churchill said that Turing made the biggest single contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.

Given the innacuracies, I won't spend time here discussing the more theoretical question of whether encrypting and decrypting by crptographers can be considered a form of translating. Just one remark. The film does mention that a test for potential recruits at BP was speed at solving crossword puzzles. Some people are good at it; I for one am not in spite of my wide reading. This leads me to suspect that there is specialised wiring for it in the brain as there is for translating, and that its implantation precedes education.

Anyway I'm not the only one to condemn the film as history. An article in today's Guardian Unlimited concludes:

Historically, The Imitation Game is as much of a garbled mess as a heap of unbroken code. For its appalling suggestion that Alan Turing might have covered up for a Soviet spy, it must be sent straight to the bottom of the class.

So by all means go and see IG; but bear in mind that films are entertainment, biography is speculative, and even history can only attempt to tell the truth.

Sources
Tommy Flowers. Wikipedia. 2014.

Bletchley Park, Home of the Codebreakers: Guidebook. Bletchley Park Trust, 2005. 48 p., many illustrations. Available through Amazon.

Turing machines. Wikipedia, 2014.

Bombe. Wikipedia. 2014.

Alex von Tunzelmann. The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult AlanTuring. Guardian Unlimited, 20 November 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-reel-history or click here.

Image
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game
Source: www.thetimes.co.uk

Medical Interpreting: the Ideal and the Reality

My own experience as a medical interpreter was brief and limited to a single patient. To find out about it, enter cullera in the Search box on the right.

The organizations of professional medical interpreters always emphasize the dangers of translation errors between patients and their doctors. They often cite the tragic case of Willy Ramirez, an American Latino baseball player who was left paralyzed because of a misunderstanding over the Spanish word intoxicado. (It means poisoned and may have nothing to do with alcohol.) When children are pressed into service, it may become even more dangerous as well as very stressful for the kids. Well, those organizations are right.

"A study by the American College of Emergency Physicians in 2012 analyzed interpreter errors that had clinical consequences, and found that the error rate was significantly lower for professional interpreters than for ad hoc interpreters 12 percent as opposed to 22 percent. And for professionals with more than 100 hours of training, errors dropped to 2 percent."

Hardly surprising. Ad hoc here means untrained and inexperienced. In some countries, like Britain and the United States, training is now available to those who have the time and money. What should the training cover, assuming the students are already competent as general interpreters?

1. Medical terminology and phraseology. Everyone thinks of this first, but there's more to it than they usually realize. There are different levels of medical language. There's the technical level used by health professionals between themselves; then there is the level they use to communicate with lay people who only know a popular 'register' of it or don't know it at all. Take the following example.

Technical: coronary thrombosis
Popular: heart attack
Uneducated and children: sharp chest pain.

A friend of mine at the University of Valladolid has just co-authored a paper about how medical language uses metaphors to translate between the technical and popular levels.
Expert Interpreters should know all the registers and how to use them. Many local health administrations now issue glossaries in the languages most spoken in their communities.

2. Basic knowledge of medicine, first aid and anatomy in both languages at Wikipedia or nursing level. If the doctor says, "I think your meniscus is torn. Does it hurt?" the patient will likely not know where the meniscus is, but the interpreter must.

3. Dealing with people (and with oneself) in stressful and even dangerous circumstances. Patients mustn't be made more nervous than they already are. Quite the contrary. Sometimes it's the medical personnel who are the problem, because they won't listen quietly and with an open mind for example. (In my own case I had trouble convincing the doctors that the patient wasn't drunk but suffering from dementia.) And of course we can't have the interpreer fainting at the sight of blood.

4. Medical ethics. The interpreter is part of the medical team and must respect the same rules about, for instance, what can or cannot be revealed to a patient's family.

Ideally, therefore, most medical interpreting would only be done by trained and qualified interpreters. But there are some 'flies in the ointment'. Where do you find such interpreters speaking the required languages, and how do you ensure they're available when and where needed?

Here's where we hit the reality.

"Thirteen years ago, the state of Oregon recognized the problem and required doctors and hospitals to start using professional interpreters. The Affordable Care Act also has expanded the kinds of materials that hospitals and insurers are required to translate for people who don't speak English. But more than a decade after its state law passed, Oregon still has trouble getting all patients the medical interpretation help they need."
"Eby [Helen Eby a certified medical interpreter in Oregon] says Oregon has about 3500 medical interpreters [i.e, interpreters who can be called in on medical assignments]. But only about 100 of those have the right qualifications. So, you have a 3 percent chance of getting a qualified or certified interpreter in Oregon right now,' she says, 'That's pretty low in my opinion'"

This comes in a report not from some underdeveloped country lacking medical infrastructures but from an American state with a highly developed hospital system.

Nor will the situation improve any time soon. I'm a supporter of telephone interpreting, which ought to make the limited supply of EMIs more widely available. But it turns out telephone interpreting has its own problems for medical interpreting: read the full report referenced below. Another solution ought to be to train more EMIs. However,

" She [Eby] says it takes a long time and costs a lot of money to become certified. And after going through all that training, a person may find that he or she can make more money or have a more stable lifestyle in another career – like being a translator for court reporting. That's because medical interpreters tend to be [classed as] consultants and don't get paid to travel. The hours can also be sparse and sporadic."

So part of the problem and its potential solution is financial. Upgrading courses should be directed first to working interpreters who already have general experience, and they should be low-cost and subsudized. EMIs need to be better paid, and there should be a large difference between their tariff and that of untrained interpreters so as to provide an incentive for the latter to upgrade.

Meanwhile I contend that the mass, the other 97%, must be recognized, studied and incorporated, not ignored. At very least, MS should be kept informed and given advice. Something along these lines:

"The interpreter assigned to you for this case is a competent general interpreter but has not qualified as an Expert Medical Interpreter (EMI). [Or in some instances, "The interpreter… has little or no experience of interpreting and has not qualified…] Be aware that the danger of mistranslations is substantially greater when the interpreter is not an EMI, just as the danger of misdiagnosis increases if the physician is not a specialist.

Here are some things you can do to help.

If you have a bilingual glossary or patient information material about the medical condition, get it to the interpreter as soon as possible.

Does what the interpreter is saying make sense and does it fit the clinical picture? If not, ask the interpreter to repeat, and if the inconsistency persists ask for an explanation of the translation.

Is the interpretation much shorter than the original? If so, check with the interpreter that nothing has been left out.

Do not use close relatives of the patient or children unless there is absolutely no alternative. Their translations are likely to be affected by their emotional involvement.

Interpreting is very tiring. Try to give your interpreter a break from time to time.

If the interpreter continually makes mistakes, ask for another.

And to the interpreters themselves:
You are a member of the medical team, subject to medical ethics. Do not attempt to intervene in the treatment or contest the doctors.

There are surely some things I've left out. But if the above advice were taken, it would at least be better than leaving the MS and the interpreter to sink or swim.

Sources
Kristian Foden Vencil. In the hospital, a bad translation can destroy a life. Shots, Health News from NPR, October 2014. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/27/358055673/in-the-hospital-a-bad-translation-can-destroy-a-life?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=health, or click here.

Beatriz Méndez Cendón et al. On the comprehension of common medical metaphorical terms / Las metáforas médicas: Un recurso para la comprensión de conceptos para el lego. Publication pending, 2014.

Image
Doctor, patient and Spanish interpreter. Source: Shots, Health News from NPR.

Belgian Nuns and Chinese Students as Wartime Interpreters

This year being the centennial of the outbreak of World War I (the 'Great War') in 1914, there has been an abundance of articles about it. Not to be outdone, my favourite language magazine The Linguist devotes a section of its current issue to Languages at War. One of the articles is Emerging from the Great War by Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. As Sandrijn is Belgian, it's natural that some of her article is about Belgians. However, she also produces a surprise: the interpreters of the Chinese Labour Corps. The British army recruited this corps to relieve the workload for the fighting troops on the Western Front, and estimates of its size range from 92,000 to 200,000. Some 40,000 were also recruited by the French.

But first the Belgians.

"As the Germans advanced through Belgium, people fled with around 250,000 crossing the North Sea to England. Very few knew any English, so help was needed, and this was often found with women's organisations… They organised themselves into volunteer groups, such as the Women's Emergency Corps and Women's Catholic League and took care of refugees by providing lodgings, healthcare and interpreting services. As well as interpreting, these volunteers were cultural brokers…
Some were Belgians or had spent time in Belgium. The congregation of the Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk, for example, originated in Belgium, coming to the UK in the 1850s. It was a very international community and, from 1895 onwards, all novices spent a year at the convent in Haacht, Belgium [see image]. Many of them therefore knew at least some Flemish. As the Ursulines wished to propagate the Christian faith through community service, it is likely that some of the nuns volunteered as interpreters. Belgian priests were also a good source of interpreting."

So here we have an example of a religious order producing Native Interpreters because it was an international organisation – as are, of course, many religious organisations of all faiths. Also of how the contexts in which the organisations work draw them to interpreting. Religion has been a great stimulus for interpreting as it has been for written translation, and it still is. See the numerous mentions of church interpreters on this blog.

The very different story of the Chinese Labour Corps takes us to the other side of the globe and of humanity. But there are connections. First the Churches. Many of the labourers were Christians and were recruited by missionaries. And then much of what we know about the labourers' sufferings comes from the diary of Father John Van Welleghen, a Belgian parish priest in Flanders who kept a diary throughout the war. His entries reflect the sympathetic attitude of the local people towards victims of the abysmally racist British Army's harsh methods. Though volunteers, they had signed contracts committing them to three years of military discipline and they were segregated in camps under armed guard. The French behaved slightly better; they at least allowed many Chinese to stay on in France after the armistice. A Chinese phrase book prepared by the British Army is suggestive: Less talk, more work, Why don't you eat this food, This is a bad business.

Which brings us to the language problem.

Most of the labourers were illiterate peasants. One solution might have been to teach some of them basic English or French, but it would have been slow. Then the recruiters in China hit on an unexpected pool of ready-made Native Translators. English and French were being widely taught in Chinese universities and missionary colleges.

"Along with the mainly illiterate peasants came a few hundred ambitious Chinese students to act as interpreters, keen to discover new ideas and European culture. They found themselves interacting with a class of Chinese they had not encountered before. In Chinese society of the time… an educated person would have no contact with the illiterate masses. Yet the war threw them together, and with lasting consequences."

Since those consequences were social and political, they are beyond the scope of this blog. However, they constitute an interesting example of the effects of interpreting on the interpreter.

One interpreter stands out as a particularly valuable source, because he later published his memoirs. His name was Gu Xingqing.

"Gu's book is the only book-length account of the First World War by a Chinese national known to exist… Gu tells the story of his journey from his home village in China to Europe, his work in France and Belgium and his return home. Although published nearly two decades after the events, Gu's account proves to be highly accurate in terms of dates and events. His main source… were the notes he had taken in Europe but which he lost during a Japanese raid… in Shanghai in 1932."

Unfortunately it's not available in English. But it stands alongside Mantoux's account of the Paris Peace Conference or the Barón de las Torres' report on the Hitler-Franco meeting at Hendaye as a case where the most reliable source for historians is the notes taken by the interpreters.


Correction
Sandrijn's article starts off with an important error. Her subtitle reads, "The professionalisation of interpreting began during WW1." The statement only makes any sense if all interpreting is equated with conference interpreting; and we may observe that Sandrijn, according to her profile in the magazine, is herself a conference interpreter. Professional Conference Interpreters tend to be dismissive of other branches of interpreting. The facts are that the French had professionalised trade interpreting in the Levant and in Canada (les Interprètes du Roy) by the 17th century; that their army had a corps of interpreters for its North African campaigns in the 19th century; that the British had professionalised their diplomatic interpreting in the Middle and Far East by the mid-19th century (see my article on Ernest Satow); that Mr Melas in the Sherlock Holmes story The Greek Interpreter was a professional court and tourist-guide interpreter in late Victorian London; and that even Paul Mantoux, the father of modern conference interpreting, was a wartime Professional Military Interpreter before he was assigned to the Paris Peace Conference. There are photos of him in his army uniform. And so on.

Sources
Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. Emerging from the Great War. The Linguist, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 10-11, 2014, The Linguist is published by the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), London. Go to http://thelinguist.uberflip.com/t/34433 or click here.

Helen Fitzwilliam. First World War: China's forgotten foreign legion. The World Today, vol. 70, no. 3, 2014. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/first-world-war-china%E2%80%99s-forgotten-foreign-legion or click here.
There's a short documentary film attached to the article.

Gu Xingqing. Wikipedia, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_Xingqing or click here.

Images
1. Tildonk Ursuline Convent. Source: Deelnemers, Tildonk.
2. British officer with CLC labourers. Photographer: 2nd Lt. David McLellan. Source: Ministry of Information Official Collection.

At the Gateway to Spain: Hitler, Franco, Pétain and their Interpreters

October 23 marks the anniversary of the famous meeting between Hitler and Franco in the railway station of the strategic French frontier town of Hendaye (Spanish Hendaya) in 1940. Hitler came as conqueror of most of Western Europe and most recently France. Franco was the victor in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Both were members of the alliance of fascist dictators called the Axis. Yet despite their initial cordiality and nine hours of talks, neither of them got what he'd come for.

There was a post on this blog about it in 2010. Since neither dictator spoke the other's language, the meeting could not have gone ahead without interpreters. Three interpreters were involved, two German (Gross and Schmidt) and one Spanish (the Barón de la Torres), but only Gross and the Spaniard actually interpreted that day. The single Professional Expert, Schmidt, was sidelined because he didn't work in Spanish, but he was there to supervise and observe. De las Torres was an Advanced Native Translator who had learnt German well as a foreign affairs official. As for Gross, we know about him only that he wasn't an Expert and was not really up to the task.

The post was well received; one comment described it as "like looking at a film." But 2010 is already a long time ago. So this year, with some additional information at my disposal, I've retrieved the post from where it's buried in the blog and worked it up into a full article. And for good measure, I've thrown in the post from 2012 about Hitler's subsequent meeting immediately afterwards with France's Pétain, likewise interpreter mediated.

So if you're interested in the history of diplomatic interpreting, or in Spain's ambivalent role in World War II, or in spying, get over to my page on academia.edu (https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS, or click here) and open or download the article At the Gateway to Spain.