| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Off topic: Oops - interpretation into the wrong language Thread poster: Robert M Maier
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Lynda Tharratt 
Local time: 21:32
Member (2006)
Spanish to English
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| my experience | Feb 10, 2004 |
Well, once I was called out to interpret all day at a construction site. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and started replying to the English speaker in Spanish and to the Spanish speaker in English. This isn't exactly the same thing, but, once I had a Japanese engineer ask me to ask a Peruvian engineer whether or not the crane on the dock would be able to hold a certain load. Well, the day before I had been translating the manual for that crane and immediately responded that, no, the cran... See more Well, once I was called out to interpret all day at a construction site. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and started replying to the English speaker in Spanish and to the Spanish speaker in English. This isn't exactly the same thing, but, once I had a Japanese engineer ask me to ask a Peruvian engineer whether or not the crane on the dock would be able to hold a certain load. Well, the day before I had been translating the manual for that crane and immediately responded that, no, the crane wasn't able to lift that load at such an angle. Oops! Well, I know I shouldn't have answered but it just popped out of my mouth. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Things happen | Feb 13, 2004 |
Unfortunately I must admit that in a few cases I did a perfect interpretation from English into... English. In general, it is more likely to happen at the end of a busy day in my booth (like 6 hours without a substitute). The organisers tend to leave free discussion for the end of day, and languages switch very quickly then. Luckily, by that time the moderator has usually learned I CAN do the job and is more tolerant... Still, my nightmare is I am doing it again...
| | | | Ildiko Santana
United States
Local time: 18:32
Member (2002)
Hungarian to English
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MODERATOR | The "perfect" simultaneous interpretation ;) | Feb 16, 2004 |
Robert M Maier wrote:
I am collecting case stories of situations where interpreters, while on the job, "missed" the target language
Hi Robert,
It is always with great joy when I think back to this rather embarrassing yet amusing story from my early years when I was doing both interpretation and translation (I've given up the former; it was just too stressful for me). It was at a huge international conference where, on our lunchbreak, my boss and I were standing around with our clients from England and from Hungary, and my boss (fully bilingual) was interpreting between the two, back and forth. By that time, he had been working for at least six hours straight. Our English client finished his sentence, my boss turned to the Hungarian partner, and... repeated *exactly* what has been said. That's right, he repeated everything in the *same language*, in English... ;^D
The moral of the story: one needs to take a break every now and then! In fact, simultaneous interpreters often work in teams of 2 or 3 switching off every 15 to 30 *minutes* due to the great amount of concentration and energy that is required.
| | | | ingo_h
Germany
Local time: 03:32
English to German
| "interpreting" | Feb 17, 2004 |
Johanna Timm, PhD wrote:
I fell into the paraphrasing trap!
I was interpreting (consecutive )G-E during a deposition at a lawyer's office in a custody case for a German speaking father. In-between some sentences the lawyer slipped me a letter from the Youth Authorities that included the assessment written by a psychologist and asked me to quickly provide a translation for the client. It was highly scientific lingo and I promptly proceeded to---paraphrase in plain English to the German client what the letter said...blush...deep deep red...
I think this is normal.
I am a lawyer and I have to talk to turkish, persian, greek and italian people.
Some times a turkish client came with his greek friend. The turk does not understand greek and the greek does not understand turkish though he is very good in interpreting from italian, greek or albanian to german) So the turk spoke german (in his way) and the greek person "interpreted" his words in german. It was al little bit ridiculous but I did'nt laugh. I saw that it all was a matter of understanding. I understood his problems and he needed his friend to talk about his problems.
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Robert M Maier
Local time: 03:32
English to German
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TOPIC STARTER | preliminary results | Nov 25, 2004 |
After a good nine months, it's high time to provide you all with some results of this little survey...
What conditions make us slip off into the wrong language? - Taking together all the factors you have mentioned, we arrive at a worst-possible scenario like this:
a) working SI alone
b) "on-job" for considerable time
c) not in the booth
d) after a lengthy monodirectional spell
e) change from one speaker to many (and lively ones, at that!)
f... See more After a good nine months, it's high time to provide you all with some results of this little survey...
What conditions make us slip off into the wrong language? - Taking together all the factors you have mentioned, we arrive at a worst-possible scenario like this:
a) working SI alone
b) "on-job" for considerable time
c) not in the booth
d) after a lengthy monodirectional spell
e) change from one speaker to many (and lively ones, at that!)
f) medium inconsistency in source (switch between visual and auditory modes of source presentation)
g) linguistic inconsistency in source (sudden change of register or language, or accent of another language)
- an outright nightmare? Sure is.
But I tried to find more than just a description of situations that might bode trouble for an interpreter...
First of all, it appears to be possible to reach a state (through years of practice, the day's exhaustion, or whatever else, or a combination, I can't say) where *any* input in the source language will automatically lead to a reaction in the target, whether that is a mere repetition/paraphrasing of what was said before or some off-topic (and thus self-instigated) utterance - as indicated in Lynda's and sarahl's stories. (Obviously useful to have while at work, but elsewhere... possibly rather annoying )
Secondly - I had mentioned the article by Selinker & Baumgartner-Cohen about the possibility of a "talk foreign"-mode. As far as that is concerned, the numbers are probably still just too small to allow any confident conclusion:
The article's prediction would be that, *if* we're getting into another language than the (non-native) proper target, it is more likely for us (or any multilingual) to end up with *another* non-native one, than with a native language.
Thus, the two main requirements are
(a) have a fluent speaker of more than two languages, and
(b) the intended target should not be among the speaker's A-languages.
So far, I can see 8 indisputable instances that fulfill condition (a), and another 8 for (b). For both (a) *and* (b), however, only 5 remain - 2 of which are of the type mentioned/predicted by the article, and 3 are not. Which, again, are not numbers of a magnitude one would easily want to go by...
(Incidentally, the likelihood to predict these outcomes would have been 80% for instances that conform with the hypothesis, 40% for those that don't. But that's more a result of the numbers involved - once you have at least one other non-native language to slip into, the chances to slip into one of these by mistake are typically at least equal to that for the native language. The average likelihood to predict the precise outcome of any of these cases would have been 44%, if anyone is still reading...)
On the other side, and more generally, it still looks as if "it" happens marginally more often as a slip from a better-known target language (typically an A-language) into a less-well known one (4:3 cases with target=A, 7:9 for output=A). ▲ Collapse
| | | | Robert M Maier
Local time: 03:32
English to German
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TOPIC STARTER
Did I say "Thank you to all who have participated"? No? Sorry... I'm really grateful to you all; it's not only good reading, but it also indicates that there IS something going on that my linguistic colleagues haven't found an explanation for yet. So my interest in this issue continues.
If any of you has more stories of how you interpreted into the wrong language, please *please* add them - or, if you feel concerned about telling them even to this audience of colleagues, send them ... See more Did I say "Thank you to all who have participated"? No? Sorry... I'm really grateful to you all; it's not only good reading, but it also indicates that there IS something going on that my linguistic colleagues haven't found an explanation for yet. So my interest in this issue continues.
If any of you has more stories of how you interpreted into the wrong language, please *please* add them - or, if you feel concerned about telling them even to this audience of colleagues, send them to me, either via my profile page or directly to robert.maier(twiddly thing)zonnet.nl. Of course, all information will be treated with strict confidentiality, your identity or any clues to it will remain undisclosed, and no spam will come your way from this.
By and large, write in any format (and indoeuropean language) that you feel comfortable with. Indicate about the situation whatever you think should be mentioned, but it would be nice if you included these:
- source, target, and actually produced language
- language information about the situation, if relevant (were there any other languages around? where was the conference - did you have to speak any other languages on the way to it? etc)
- additional language information about yourself, if (in the situation described) different from your profile page
I'll post a request for more on some other boards soon, and will keep you informed about further results. Thanks a lot once more for your help so far, and for the next batch that I hope to receive soon!
Robert
[Edited at 2004-11-25 18:47] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | The movie The Interpreter | May 5, 2005 |
Watching that movie was horridly painful due to the
numerous languages being spoken in it! I felt like my
head was going to implode (or explode, I haven't quite
decided ;D) and I ended up talking to my Finnish friends
in Catalan!! for a while until I got my head cleared
out again. I suppose I should mention that we went to see
the movie after a full day of work and so being tired
played a role in this, and as a matter of fact, being tired
the m... See more Watching that movie was horridly painful due to the
numerous languages being spoken in it! I felt like my
head was going to implode (or explode, I haven't quite
decided ;D) and I ended up talking to my Finnish friends
in Catalan!! for a while until I got my head cleared
out again. I suppose I should mention that we went to see
the movie after a full day of work and so being tired
played a role in this, and as a matter of fact, being tired
the most common reason I unintentionally change languages.
I also find that certain language combinations cause this,
e.g., Finnish and Spanish being spoken in the same room.
One of the times that my spouse laughs about happened one
summer in Helsinki when I was speaking Quechua (had to have
been the beginning of the 90s, since I can't speak Quechua
anymore! ) to a hawker in the outdoor market and then
interpreting it into Finnish/English for my spouse. At some point in time during this mishmash of languages, I changed
directions. I have no idea how long I spoke the wrong languages
to them since both of them were too polite to tell me!
Now a question for those of you who talk in your sleep:
do you continue using the language you used at work that day
or do you revert back to your mother tongue? I have been
videotaped speaking in ASL and in other languages in my sleep,
so I am apparently a case of the former. Scares the pants off
of people though ;D
-K ▲ Collapse
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