Learning by Translating

Larger version here.

Yes, I’d like to get into photography.

I know this topic has already been widely discussed, but educating our clients is (and will always be) a matter of the utmost importance.

A few days ago, when I visited some relatives of mine, we talked about my intention of getting an MA in Translation. I’ve been asked: “So, you’re going to work at conferences, aren’t you?”. It wasn’t the first time that somebody asked me if I’m going to work as an interpreter. I had to explain my relatives what’s the difference between the two professions. I came to the conclusion that lay people often confuse translators with interpreters: not only did I take my personal experience into account, but also posts I read on other translation blogs.

While translators deal with written texts, interpreters work with oral texts (speeches, conversations and utterances in general) and render them orally, either consecutively or simultaneously (with the exception of the so-called “sight translation”, which is the oral rendition of a written text, done immediately and without using dictionaries). There are also people who both translate and interpret, but a good translator doesn’t necessarily make a good interpreter, and vice versa. It’s just a matter of skills. According to James Nolan:

The translator relies mainly on thorough research with background materials and dictionaries in order to produce the most accurate and readable written translation possible. The interpreter relies mainly on the ability to get the gist of the message across to the target audience on the spot. [...] However, in practice, the translator is usually held to a higher standard of accuracy and completeness (including the ability to reproduce the style of the original), while the interpreter is expected to convey the essence of the message immediately. The translator’s activity is more like that of a writer, while the interpreter’s performance is more like that of an actor. A good translator will spend much time searching for the correct technical term or the right choice of words, but a good interpreter must come up with a satisfactory paraphrase or a rough equivalent if le mot juste does not come to mind, in order not to keep the audience waiting.

(“Interpretation Techniques and Exercises”, Multilingual Matters, 2005, pp. 2-3)

Julia K. Barbalace of English Russian Translations wrote:

In my opinion, the professionals who work with interpreters and translators should be aware of the difference between these two terms and use them appropriately. At the same time, we interpreters and translators, should also take a proactive approach and try to clear the misconceptions and promote our professions.

You can read the rest of Julia’s article (very useful and written in detail) about the difference between translators and interpreters here.

Ecco una bibliografia contenente riferimenti a libri e pagine web sull’interpretazione televisiva, argomento della mia tesi di Laurea triennale dal titolo “Gli interpreti del piccolo schermo: On-screen Intercultural Mediation”.

• AAE-ESIT, ARTE: la chaîne des langues, 1998 (http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/office/1936/audio2.html).

• AIB, Interpretation on television, ESPaiic, 2001 (http://www.aibcnet.com/consejos_traduccion/television.php?id=en).

• AIIC, Essential do’s and dont’s when using simultaneous conference interpreting on TV (http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article28).

• AIIC Technical and Health Committee, Media Interpreting – a different sort of world (http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article91.htm).

• BROS-BRANN, E., Checklist for TV Interpretation, 1989 (http://www.aiic.net/community/attachments/ViewAttachment.cfm/a456p635-734.pdf?&filename=a456p635-734.pdf&page_id=635).

• BROS-BRANN, E., Simultaneous interpreting and the media: interpreting live for television (http://www.aiic.net/community/attachments/ViewAttachment.cfm/a452p630-726.pdf?&filename=a452p630-726.pdf&page_id=630).

• CHIARO, D., “Linguistic mediation on Italian television: When the interpreter is not an interpreter: a case study”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 215-225.

• GAMBIER, Y., GOTTLIEB, H. (a cura di), (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices, and Research, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001.

• KALINA, S., “‘Microphone off’ – Application of the process model of interpreting to the classroom”, in Kalbotyra, 57 (3), 2007, pag. 116.

• KATAN, D., STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “Look Who’s Talking. The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting”, in The Translator, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing, 7, 2, 2001, pagg. 213-237.

• KURZ, I., “Physiological stress responses during media and conference interpreting”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 195-202.

• KURZ, I., BROS-BRANN, E., L’interprétation en direct pour la télévision, in GAMBIER, Y. (a cura di), Les transferts linguistiques dans les médias audiovisuels, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion (attualmente in fase di ristampa).

• MACK, G., “L’interpretazione in tv: vecchie e nuove ipotesi di ricerca”, Relazione presentata al Congresso di fondazione dell’Associazione italiana di linguistica applicata AITLA, Pisa, 22 e 23.10.1999 (http://home.sslmit.unibo.it/~aitla/pisa/mack.htm).

• MACK, G., “New perspectives and challenges for interpretation: The example of television”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21^st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 203-213.

• NIEMANTS, N., 2001 Unomattina: a case study in media interpreting, tesi di Laurea Specialistica non pubblicata, SSLMIT, Università di Bologna, 2008 (http://www.dailynterpreter.com/my-writings).

• RICCARDI, A., Dalla traduzione all’interpretazione. Studi di interpretazione simultanea, LED, 2003.

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “I (Paolo) Limiti dell’interpretazione, ovvero i mediatori antagonisti del testo televisivo”, Relazione presentata al Congresso di fondazione dell’Associazione italiana di linguistica applicata AITLA, Pisa, 22 e 23.10.1999 (http://home.sslmit.unibo.it/~aitla/pisa/straniero.htm).

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “Norms and quality in media interpreting: the case of Formula One press conferences”, in The Interpreter’s Newsletter, n. 12, 2003 (http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2480/1/06.pdf).

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., Talkshow Interpreting. La mediazione linguistica nella conversazione spettacolo, Trieste, EUT – Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007.

You read right, another post about interpreting.

Last night I dreamt that I was shadowing a simultaneous interpretation from English into Italian! I was doing an actual reformulation, not a mere repetition of words! No, I wasn’t interpreting, just rephrasing what was being said in Italian. Maybe that dream is a reminder: practice.interpreting. I haven’t done interpreting practice in a while, I should catch up with it.

When I practice interpreting, I do it just for fun. I download podcasts and play them using VLC media player (if they’re too fast for my level, this software allows me to “slow them down”… it’s rare to find audio files that are slow enough for beginners like me). I record myself using either Audacity (you can also play the audio file you’re interpreting with it, and listen to the original and the interpreted versions after you’ve finished) or a digital audio recorder (before buying one, I used my cell phone’s audio recorder that allowed me to record up to 5 minutes at a time).

Ways in which I practice interpreting:

• Simultaneous interpreting (I think this is self explanatory enough)
• Consecutive interpreting (you take notes using a spiral-bound notepad and a pen/pencil while the speaker is speaking, then you translate after he/she finished his/her speech. You can’t note every single thing, because you don’t have the time to, and you have to pay a lot of attention to the speech. I noticed that the more I pay attention to taking notes, the more I get distracted. Interpreters must learn to split attention between two activities, and I think this doesn’t apply only to simultaneous interpreting, in which you listen and speak at the same time, but also to consecutive interpreting. Most interpreters use abbreviations or symbols while taking notes)
• Sentence-by-sentence interpreting (a kind of interpreting that is usually done in a liaison interpreting context. First there is the sentence in language A, then you interpret it into language B, then the language B speaker replies to the language A speaker, and you interpret what he said into language A, etc. It is not done simultaneously, but it is rather a form of consecutive interpreting without notes)
• Shadowing (like I wrote at the beginning of the post, it is an exercise in which you reformulate, or repeat, what a speaker says in the same language. You can also do it after a few seconds from the original utterance, trying to lag behind the original speaker as if you’re doing simultaneous interpreting)

(I know, I wrote that I’m more of a written translation person, but I’ve got bitten by the interpreting bug from the very first moment)

I want to study and get my MA in Translation.
You read right.
Not Interpreting, t r a n s l a t i o n .
The interpreter’s job still fascinates me, though. Whenever I see photos of interpreters behind the booth’s glass I think “Wow!” and start daydreaming… but I realized that I feel more confident when it comes to translating written texts.
I just wanted to write this, I don’t have much inspiration to write a detailed post today.

EDITED on 05/18/2009

I still want to become an interpreter.
I eventually decided to try both the entrance tests: the one for the Translation MA course and the one for the Interpreting MA course, just to have two possibilities.
At least I will have said I gave the Interpreting one a try.
Sometimes I get discouraged because I’m afraid of not being able to deal with a fast speaker while doing simultaneous interpreting, but I realized that there are techniques that are taught during the Interpreting MA course. I never really did simultaneous interpreting, I actually gave it a try on my own, but I’ve just started. I have a degree in Translation and Interpreting, but liaison interpreting (which I studied) and conference interpreting are different. I still have a lot to learn and, for the moment, I do simultaneous interpreting practice with speeches which aren’t fast.
Maybe Interpreting is the course for me… or maybe it is Translation… but only the future will decide which one is better for me.
I won’t change my mind anymore.

(no, I’m not going to write a blog post about the Black Eyed Peas song with the same title!)

FSTI stands for “From Student To Interpreter”, a new blog category I’ve just created!

My preparation for the entrance exam has officially begun!

I only hope that four months are enough (the exam is going to be in September).

I downloaded past exam audio files to do some practice. The exam consists of two cloze tests per language and one reformulation exercise for each language. The cloze tests are different from the ones I am used to, because in the former the text is purely oral (I suppose), and in the latter it is written. At the entrance exam you have to fill in a grid with the missing words (you have to insert a word for each beep you hear in the audio file). The “Video Vocab” videos on Business English Pod have a similar exercise, in which there is a part in which  words related to a certain topic, their definitions and examples containing them are shown, and then an exercise in which you have to insert the missing word, that is structured almost in the same way as the entrance exam one (I wrote “almost” because you can read the sentence, instead of just hearing it).

Does anyone know any websites where I can find similar exercises? I would like to do practice on as many subjects as possible, since you can’t know on which subjects you must get ready for the exam. Thanks in advance!

Yesterday I came across an interesting acronym that can be referred, in my opinion, to both studying and interpreting: Preparation Prevents Poor Performances.

A year ago I found (while reading “From Our Lips to Your Ears”, one of my favourite interpreting blogs) a very interesting radio programme on language-related topics: “Talkin’ About Talk”. It was broadcast in 2005, the Year of Languages in America. There are different topics covered, e.g. bilingualism, translation and interpreting, dialects, threatened or dying languages, language learning, etc. Here you can find all the radio scripts and download the episodes. Actually, I’ve listened only to “What does it take to be an interpreter”?, but I would like to download some other episodes (like “Is British English Superior to Ours?”, which is about British VS American English, a topic that has always fascinated me; “Do you have to go abroad to learn a language?”; “What does it mean to be bilingual?”; “Can you make a living loving languages?”; “What does it take to learn a language well?”; “How good is machine translation?”; and “How are dictionaries made?”).

“What talent it takes to translate one language into another — listening and speaking at the same time! You can’t pick up a dictionary. And you can’t just spit out words like a robot. The interpreter’s job is to convey meaning. And since a lot of meaning is expressed by tone of voice or the nuance of words and phrases, his job is far more than translating word for word.

[...]

A translator needs somewhat different skills. But again, strong knowledge of two languages is just the beginning, because translating can get very complicated. There’s the question of technical terms. Lawyers file writs of mandamus. Physicians treat hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The terminology can be pretty daunting, and for translation you need to understand what it means. Because, like interpreting, translation isn’t about words. It’s about what the words are about. Simply looking things up in a dictionary isn’t enough. Not even close.”

(http://www.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/2005/10/what_does_it_ta_1.html)