Gosh - Eileen, Anne, and I going to be in good company!
Don't get nervous.....
Interpreting: August 2005 Archives
The good thing about being among friends when one begins to interpret after a long absence is that they tend to just be entertained by one's mistakes. The best one was "poop" instead of "gas" but I thought "elevator" instead of "emergency" was also amusing. %-/
My team was great. She caught me using 'abuse' instead of 'discipline' and that was an error that could have slipped by in context. And I don't recall the sentence but there was something she helped me clarify at the end - I asked her, was I not clear? She said, "You signed exactly what the presenter said but what she said wasn't all that clear." Ah yes, now there/s an interpreter decision that matters!
One of these years I'll get to attend this conference. I hear great things about it every time.
In the meantime, I'll catch up with Eileen there.
Eileen's and my proposal for ASLTA's conference this fall was accepted. Hopefully Anne is gonna be able to join us because it's time. :-)
Here's what we said we were gonna do:
Language-in-Action: The Shape of Deaf Discourse about Interpreters
From a European Parliament interpreter (via email):
"I'm happy that "we" behaved decently towards you and that you've been
able to see for yourself that Europeans still don't eat innocent
Americans with hot milk for breakfast....one more "homo Bushiens"
elected to become US-president, and who knows, though....;-))
Actually you did bring home to me again that we interpreters are still
this one big international family."
I also got a hot tip on a new film about interpreters, called The Whisperers, will premiere in Berlin soon.
A free MA program for refugees to become interpreters at Cardiff University! (Still have to hunt for the specifics.)
Nikolas Rose (1999), Powers of Freedom.
The most obvious factor in Turkish language acquisition and maintenance in Germany is that the original guestworkers were not intended to stay, and if they did, they were supposed to learn German, period. It is a very recent phenomenon for persons of Turkish descent to realize that they have the right to speak Turkish (using interpreters), and the general German population (even in education!) has not yet realized that this is a multilingual asset.
I'm not sure if/how this youth protest movement might intersect with interpreting, but I it's definitely worth checking out. the movement was apparently tiggered by the book, Kanak Sprak, which doesn't seem to have been translated into English. YEt? :-( by Feridun Zaimoglu. More on Zaimoglu.
There's a film, an album, participation in a conference (sorry I missed it!), Fadaiat 2005:
"Fadaiat - which means "through spaces" in arabic - is a political, technological and artistic laboratory that takes place from 17th to 26th of June 2005 in Tanger (Spain) & Tarifa (Morocco) on both sides of the tense frontier dividing Europe from Africa.
What for? To advance in the construction of social, collaborative networks, local and transnational, connecting cognitarians, migrants and precarious, to research and develop tools, to exchange and share knowledge, to discuss common strategies and projects... within the reference framework of the new borders."
Mannheim is the place to be!!!
I've already had two interviews and more are on the horizon. Last night friends of the friends I'm staying with invited us to their restaurant (where a family birthday party was in progress!) - I learned a great deal about "family interpreting" in a very short time. The experiences of Turkish children growing up here seems quite similar, in some respects, to that of non-deaf children raised by Deaf parents. In this conversation, I realized an important assumption that I think has been operative in interviews I've had with other interpreters who have criticized the Turkisch language competence of so-called community and even officially "sworn" court interpreters.
Several things fell into place this afternoon - right as I'm getting ready to leave the city. The vagaries of un-institutional fieldwork!
Most importantly, I got access to the Court's list of "sworn interpreters" [a pdf] via a city link that provides official and touristic info.
One of my ex/outlaw's read the most recent paper on interpreter-deaf discourse(s) and made some crucial observations. Of course, she was struck by the assumption that just because someone is "out" of their own culture that this automatically means you're "in" another one. She also felt there was a contradiction between interrupting a few times being "ok" but too much is "offensive" (these are her terms). Yes, on the one hand it seems like a double standard, but on the other the motivation or cause for the interruption is different. We need to work on making this distinction more clear. It's not the interrupting, per se, but the the frequency of it indicates something else, and that "something else" is what Deaf folk are upset about.
I participated in an online survey some months ago, and the results show me in the most common range in almost everything. Some highlights:
46% feel highly valued and appreciated (4 on a scale of 1-5)
53% worked fewer than 20 billable jobs in the three months preceding this survey (makes me wonder if it's parttime work for most - like me?)
90% worked for up to 40 different organizations in the previous 3 month period (I wonder how many only work for a small handful? This is obscured.)
Pay is broadly distributed, but the largest percentage, 36%, earns between $30.00 and 39.99/hour.
Finally, while experience in the field varied widely, the largest percentage of respondents to this survey, 35%, had more than 16 years.
