Interpreting: September 2005 Archives

I had a cool job today. It was a balanced group, roughly even numbers of deaf and non-deaf participants, and a wonderful team. She fed me an incorrect number once, but also a vitally important concept that I'd missed emphasizing adequately. I backed her up on a few things too. Let her have a couple of nice long turns, too. :-) Such teamwork isn't an unusual element of interpreting - what made these examples stand out so much today is that they were the only things we had to worry about!

This was the group's third meeting. Prior to the beginning of the second meeting, one of the Deaf participants approached me, asking what I thought about how it went the first time. She had some concerns (having noticed some things), and so did I. She asked me to exaggerate the processing time when she addressed the group regarding turn-taking norms. I did - not 100% consecutive, but long enough that there was no way the non-deaf participants could ignore the fact of something being said that they couldn't understand.

I presented on this topic to mental health care providers at the National Alliance on Mental Illness conference in Washington, DC a year ago. A one page summary of the presentation has been published online in a pdf file; scroll down to this piece directed to non-deaf professionals on pages 28-29.

well, he's not totally against it, but he's definitely for curtailing it. His hard-hitting critique says much (blurring the terms translation and intepretation), including a call

"to go beyond the logic inscribed in the discourse of translation. If one is to believe in translation, in the people who support and live from translations, translation is always necessary and that's the end of the story. But if one begins by looking at interlingual space, the only real question is how we ever came to believe in translation so much. How did we ever get to this ideal "usage de toutes les langues" and the associated theories?

Several reasons:

First, there is a wide gap between the official discourse and what actually happens on the ground. Despite claims to respect multilingualism through translation, the European Commission deploys what is called a "real needs policy", which basically incorporates use of a lingua franca or the use of passive competences wherever possible, as happened in the French-English conference cited above. This tends to mean that the more specialized the meetings, the less there are interpreters present. The official discourse on translation is thus largely produced for external consumption, to keep the masses and academics happy.

Second, because the official discourse exists, many translations are carried out for purely symbolic purposes."

from a google search on language regime European parliament:

a thesis on the EU language regime (addresses both translation and interpretation) Quotes follow from this thesis:

"The Interpreting Directorate of the European Parliament employs approximately 240 permanent staff interpreters and relies on a reserve of more than 1000 auxiliary conference interpreters, of whom between 200 and 500 must be recruited each day to cover its needs. In 2002, the total volume of activity represented 56000 interpreter days for the European Parliament organs alone. Staff interpreters accounted for ± 50% of these working days, the remainder being provided by auxiliary conference interpreters. (Europa: Gateway to the European Union)"

"According to the official website of the European Commission, in 2004, the twenty official languages of the European Union are: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish (Europa: Gateway to the European Union). The website provides elaborate information and detailed figures on the official languages in 199815, indicating the weight and importance of each language according to various data and inquiries."

Somewhere, this person got the idea that Esperanto is being used by many people within the EU institutions. Maybe I was in the wrong places or talking to the wrong people to find this out? People whom I met that were completely unassociated with the EU and interpreting would sometimes ask me about Esperanto when they found out what I was doing, but the word never arose in any of the fieldwork.

Because part of my funding for the EuroParl interpreter research came from anthropology, there's been a big push to do ethnography. I've really only collected discourse at this stage, which I will look at through a critical discourse lens because I'm interested in language hierarchies and linguistic inequality. There is plenty of evidence of these things in EuroParl interpreters' talk about their work and working conditions. Rather than deduction (coming up with an hypothesis based on theory) or induction (making what I find fit some theory), abduction is about invention. It requires applying imagination to generate theory, to come up with categories based on the combination of characteristics discovered (the expected and the unexpected). My next task is to distinguish between what Agar calls rich points (the surprises) and those things that meshed with my expectations.

As I've been reading the new chapter, Ethnography Reconstructed, that Michael Agar added to the new edition of his text, The Professional Stranger, I was reminded of the discussions I had with some EuroParl interpreters regarding journalism and research. The question, as I'm revisiting it now, was clearly about concerns regarding what I would actually do with the data. Several interpreters were concerned with misrepresentation, having what they said taken out of context. A few had had bad experiences with the press and were even more wary. Some just wanted to be clear that I was not a journalist because interpreters are professionally proscribed from speaking to journalists about their work.

The question of what I am 'going to do' with all those hours of audiotaped interviews and notes is serious. I don't know if the question of journalism/research was a mirror or parallel for the question of critical or applied, but it is obvious to me now that I've been a bit confused about the differences between these two modes and need to gain clarity and make some decisions pretty darn fast.

These are links to most of the entries I made about the fieldwork. NOT included are posts specific to methodology and analytical theory.

The airport code for Cape Town International Airport is CPT. This is the closest and is where transport is arranged from.

The code for Johannesburg International is JNB. Might be cheaper. Transport?