When Gabe Bokor asked me to write a profile for the Translation Journal,
I was, of course flattered and honored. At the same time, I felt
pressured to do a good job—after all, I'd be writing for a community of
language professionals. So the first thing I did was read a few of the
profiles that had been written by colleagues before me. I was going to
just read one or two to get an idea of what's expected, and then knock
off a quick sketch of myself that would fit the bill. I also began
jotting down ideas of what to say, about how I don't fit the usual
profile of a translator/interpreter because I didn't grow up bilingual,
I didn't marry someone from another culture, I didn't even study abroad
in college. I was all set to write about my mundane, non-cosmopolitan
background and I began collecting adjectives like vanilla, white-bread,
and prosaic. But I got so caught up in reading the profiles written by
colleagues I admire that I kept procrastinating the writing of my own,
and the more profiles I read, the more I realized there is no typical translator or interpreter. As the protagonist shouted to the crowd of followers in Life of Brian, "You are all unique!"
My procrastination proved to be serendipitous in another way,
because during that time, while working on another project, I read
Jesús Baigorri-Jalón's book about the history of the interpreters at
the United Nations. After regaling the reader with stories of the
exotic and brilliant pioneers who founded the modern-day profession of
conference interpreting, the author proceeded to describe their
successors:
So the identikit picture of the UN interpreter of the last two
decades corresponds to the following characteristics, even though no
single interpreter fits the picture exactly, of course. The interpreter
is female. She comes from a monolingual middle-class family. She starts
learning foreign languages at primary and secondary school. She
improves her command of the languages she is studying by spending short
periods of time in the countries where the languages are spoken. She
has a very good command of her mother tongue and a good command of
another two languages (a better command of one than of the other of
these two). She is not a perfect bilingual. She takes a degree course
at an interpreting school. She works as a freelance interpreter or
translator for a time. She starts work in the UN after several years
experience when she is just over thirty. She reads newspapers,
particularly in her own language and in English and she is up-to-date
on current affairs. She is fond of reading, in several languages, of
music—especially classical music—and of doing crosswords.
There is no typical translator or interpreter. “You are all unique!” |
Other
than the minor detail that I'm not a UN interpreter, that's me! (Also,
my time spent in other countries was very short indeed, and my
"command" of my third language, French, is rather feeble, but still
...) So, after having my stereotypes shattered, I am left with the
notion that I'm not so unique after all. Here's my story:
I am currently a freelance translator/interpreter in the
Spanish/English combination, and I teach half-time in the Graduate
School of Translation & Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies. I specialize in court interpreting and legal
translation. I've written a lot of books and articles, including a
series of training manuals for court interpreters that I publish under
the name of Acebo. That's the official story.
The reality is that I hardly ever interpret anymore, and I'm
terrified of losing my hard-won skills in simultaneous and consecutive
interpreting. I'm also worried about losing my credibility as a teacher
of court interpreting, because I've lost touch with the day-to-day work
of the interpreter in our judiciary system. And as long as I'm baring
my soul, I'll also confess that I don't even think I would like being a
court interpreter today. When I first started out, I was fascinated by
the law, by crime and punishment, by the quirks of human nature, by the
infinite variety of linguistic registers and idiolects that converge in
the courtroom. In the court proceedings of a relatively small town in
the 1970s, I had time to notice all these things. Recently when I've
gone to court, all I've seen is an assembly line, a sausage machine. So
I'm grateful that there are legions of court interpreters who haven't
succumbed to cynicism, who are willing to carry on this vital work
without getting discouraged. I meet them whenever I present a workshop
somewhere in the country, and I'm honored by their enthusiasm and
dedication.
I didn't set out to be a court interpreter. When I entered the
Monterey Institute as a graduate student in 1974, I'm not sure such a
job title even existed, though there were plenty of people doing that
work off and on, here and there. I chose to pursue a degree in this
field because 1) I loved languages, 2) I didn't want to be a professor
of literature—in fact, I didn't want to teach at all—and 3) I couldn't
get a job anywhere with a B.A. in sociology so graduate school seemed
like the thing to do. Actually, I didn't see myself as an interpreter
because I've always been shy, I don't like life in the fast lane, and I
didn't think I was fluent enough in Spanish or French (I was certainly
right about that). I thought I would just lead a quiet life translating
the text on Corn Flakes boxes for export to Latin America.
Studying translating and interpreting (T&I) at the Monterey
Institute of Foreign Studies, as it was known back then (good old MIFS,
whose soccer team was the Mifsfits) was a rude awakening. Having gotten
straight A's in all my language courses previously, I was stunned to
discover that foreigners don't spend all their time engaged in
dialogues about going to the library or analyzing the themes in novels;
they go to the doctor and try to figure out the stereo they just bought
and sue each other and build highways, just like we do. And there are words
for all those things! I spent a good part of my time as a student
crying in the bathroom, wondering what possessed me to sign up for this
School of Torture and Inquisition.
Somehow, mostly thanks to the patience and insight of my professor
and mentor Etilvia Arjona, I gradually discovered that I had an
aptitude not only for translating, but also for interpreting. Except
for that niggling detail of having to be fluent in more than one
language, I was a natural. I turned out to be good at public speaking,
synthesizing ideas, thinking on my feet and coming up with just the
right term at just the right moment. All I had to do was abandon any
thought of working in French and toil like a fiend to improve my
Spanish.
I also didn't set out to be a famous author. My training manuals
were just a compilation of exercises that had worked for me as a
student and texts that I put together to help prepare people for the
working world as I had found it. I got tired of receiving multiple
requests for copies of my materials from former students who had lost
theirs or who had been asked to teach a class, so I put them all
together in a 3-ring binder that would be easy to mail out. That
eventually turned into the books that are now used in classes all over
the country, much to my delight and amazement. The only problem is,
people look up to me and expect me to be a fount of knowledge, when I'm
really not much different from that terrified student who feared every
day she'd be exposed as a fraud and kicked out of school.
Some of the features of life as a T&I student in the 1970s would
seem alien to those who are pursuing their careers today: translating
on a typewriter, armed with plenty of white-out and extra paper for
those times when you had to retype an entire page because of a single
error in the first paragraph; researching terms in the 10-year-old
encyclopedia set in the library and relying on the Louis Robb bilingual
dictionaries, which were already 20 years old back then; practicing
with speeches that had been recorded on reel-to-reel tapes and were
then transferred to those new-fangled cassettes, which we played on big
clunky tape players. Other aspects are still all too familiar, though:
reading up on monetary policy, a topic you never had the slightest
interest in, to make sense out of a translation assignment that might
as well be written in Greek; being called on to interpret in class when
your pen ran dry and the guy sitting next to you sneezed at a crucial
point in the speech and you have no idea what the speaker's conclusion
was—these are things that never change.
Similarly, life as a translator in the 21st century looks
very different from the one I embarked upon after graduation. I no
longer receive my translations by mail or traipse off to the public
library in the hopes that there will be a book on copper mining so I
can look up these unknown terms, or put in an expensive phone call to
Chile to talk to the engineer in charge of the project, only to
discover that the office just closed for the weekend. Now I get the
source text by email, and I have the entire world at my fingertips via
the Internet. But somehow, I still find myself agonizing over word
choices and puzzling over an illegible scanned source text riddled with
typographical errors, and finally submitting the translation on a wing
and a prayer, just barely in time to meet the client's absurd deadline,
hoping that there are no egregious errors that will end up in a
"translation bloopers" column. Some things never change
by Holly Mikkelson
This
article was originally published at http://accurapid.com/journal/toc.htm
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