Call this ACTION LEARNING!: May 2009 Archives

Imagine my surprise upon entering the lobby at Lessius University and witnessing a conversation in American Sign Language! My brain has been so otherwise-occupied that it never once crossed my mind that

a) anyone other than European spoken language trainers/researchers would attend or that
b) I might actually know people!

It was absolutely delightful to re-encounter respected colleagues, meet some of the luminaries whose work is required reading, and make new friends (although one always wonders whether they'll claim me, and/or for how long!) ;-)


We started quite seriously, with the keynoter, Mariachiara, setting the context with a superb history of the tension between innate talent and built skill. Are interpreters born or made? Perhaps it is a both/and kind of question, with challenges of re-molding/re-training those with "the aptitude to perform" and fresh cultivation of those with "the aptitude to learn."

At the end of the day, Miriam reflected that we (interpreter researchers) have learned that we're asking the right questions, but we don't seem any closer to clear answers! One needs only hark back to the presentations of Her Majesty of No Results and the Princess of No Significance to find evidence supporting Miriam's perception. Are we guilty of trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse?

"You're argumentative!" one of my dinnermates proclaimed, as I sought to champion a shadowing task based on the persuasive argumentation of the aforementioned Queen.

I don't want to be accused of breaking the pinkie pact (especially since I wasn't at the presenter's dinner the night before when they apparently made a rule not to ask each other hard questions), but . . . aren't the hard questions the ones that most need to be asked?!

"You're against essentialism in all forms!" Miriam bought me a coffee. :-)

(I think this means we are now bonded for life.) Franz invited me to come after him hard....which I did but it wasn't easy going. First he thought I was arguing that "everything is cognition," which he agreed is a way that knowledge in the field can be understood. It took some fancy footwork to get across the idea that what I am critiquing is the way that we (interpreters, interpreter trainers, interpreting researchers) collude in assuming that everything in the field can be broken down into nice, neat, discrete boxes. Miriam rephrased this as the human propensity to put everything in categories.

"It's interesting, but I don't agree with half of it!" (Shhhsh that interpreter in the corner!)


"Why does your badge say 'Belgium' but you are speaking English?" Heidi was trying to process where I was from and why I was delinquent in signing up for the conference dinner. Really, I'm here under cover . . . just as there are "slides no wants to see" (recall the pinkie promise), there are also "some matters untouched" (Cronbach and Snow 1977:6).

"Is this rubbish?" (Get ready, I'm gonna be asking you, Chris!) Meanwhile, Amalija has two weeks to devise the perfect comprehensive provable aptitude test for her incoming screening. She has the power! As Sarka explained,

"some of these people want to be translating Shakespeare's sonnets, they don't want anything to do with other people!"

One of the huge dilemmas in interpreter training is predicting when a potential interpreting student might succeed against the evidence that convinces us they won't, and how to justify the investment of resources when even those students with all the promising signs turn out unable in the end.

"There are no future facts." (Robert S Brumbaugh, 1966)


What can we learn from the ones who had it made?

It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don't even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can't even fathom.

The East-West debate came up: does one interpret only into one's mother tongue, or from a mother tongue into another fluent language? Why, I wonder, are people so invested in this directionality? Meanwhile, the non-sign repetition task of nonsense biological motion that Chris reported seems an awful lot like shadowing to me.... and can I just mention how cool it is to attend a conference with five active languages, three of which are signed?! I am not able to articulate the significance of increases in visual memory, but it caught my attention...advanced interpreters can apparently correctly select geometric shapes after a delay more rapidly than beginning interpreters. Perhaps this is related to what I've noticed in my own neural net, specifically the new capacity to learn math after twenty years of signing.

Brooke had the two best slides so far, understating the case for the performance of simultaneous interpretation: "we have a lot to do." (Can I get copies? Beg beg beg!) I'm especially intrigued by the risk/avoidance measures....just a few days ago I came up with the title for my next conference proposal: "Risk, Resignation, and Loss: Interlocutors on Interpretation in the European Parliament." (Next week I present some of the results at a conference on Mikhail Bakhtin in Stockholm).

I love the metaphor of the airplane and its engines. Sarka and Heidi get credit for this one together, right? There are the pair (or more) of wing engines that are all about cruising, and then there's the solo job in the tail, which is all about getting up to altitude. Sherry might win the prize for getting the earliest start, although there is a four year discrepancy concerning the age at which she began interpreting: four? Eight? Then you've got peeps like me who didn't even start learning a second language until 28! Anyway, I am pleased to go along with the decisions that "all of us made" in Sherry's "we", particularly the one about merging modalities. The two tests she shared intrigue me: the CNS Vital Signs and the Achievement Motivation Inventory.

I hope no one throws a wobbly because of anything I've written here. I was duly warned that someone would have my guts for garters if I transgressed too far. Might I ask, instead, for a soft word on the side and the chance to edit?

:-)

Language is a force.

Language names, and by naming, it calls into being. This is how social reality is constructed and maintained. I think it is an effect of quantum mechanics, but smarter minds than mine are needed to make the connections in a compelling scientific manner.

Last fall I wrote a post on some dynamics of dialogue and discourse, in which I engaged with ideas of a discursive psychologist, Michel Billig.

The core of the argument laid out by Michael Billig (in the articles from Discourse and Society 2008, Vol. 19, Issue 6) is that we who think in terms of critical discourse analysis (CDA) need to be acutely aware of our own uses of language, lest we repeat some of the very elements of language use that we critique in others. Billig's concern is with social scientific language in general; he selects CDA for heuristic and practical purposes: "It should be a major issue for analysts who stress the pivotal role of language in the reproduction of ideology, inequality and power" (p. 784).

In particular, Billig goes after the academic/theoretical use of nominalization, which is a shorthand way of condensing a particular dynamical concept (something with a lot of parts) into a single term. Debate over costs and benefits of using nominalization seem to swing on the temporal grounding of interlocutors. I'm thinking at the mundane level as well as at level of ideological reproduction. For instance, does saying something about (i.e., naming) tensions in a friendship necessarily make them worse or can it provide a means to shift footings? At the precise moment of making the utterance, there may be a spike in bad feelings - all that tension concentrated and released in the acts of speaking and hearing. But I think that it is what comes next (at least, so I hope) that becomes determinative for the subsequent unfolding. When nominalization is at play, Billig argues there is a tendency to depersonalize behavior or action such that individual contributions to whatever unfolds are lost to perception. So the pattern of tensions enacted when one or another party to the tension actually says something directly about the presence or evidence of tension becomes bigger than the minute social interactions that compose it. The pattern itself becomes "the thing", and individuals are simply swept up in it, all agency erased.

The question is, when things are not going the way one wishes, what next? I watched an interesting video on the synthesis of happiness this morning (20 minutes long) which argues that if we assume irretrievability, then we enhance our capacity to choose happiness. I'm wondering if this basic precept - that's what done is done and can't be changed - could guide many other choices, including the ways we respond when we find ourselves seemingly trapped in a discourse that we don't necessarily want. I believe it is the element of acknowledgment that I am finding most attractive. Perhaps my general communicative strategy is to reduce uncertainty (see What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous) in order to make choices clear.

Perhaps.