What to listen to in Japanese

The academic article I referred about in the previous post is raising a big question mark in terms of listening strategies for the non-native learner of Japanese. I have never read anything about the subject. For an interpreter, the listening/understanding rate target is 100%. That's the theory. In practical terms, and whether one is on training or on-the-job mode, the situations are different. What are the audio cues, the stresses to focus on when listening to Japanese? What is so specific that must absolutely not get lost at the understanding level with the topography of the Japanese sentence? The literature referring to that matter seems to solely focus on English as a foreign language. There is nothing I am aware of to pull a string from and think about Japanese instead of English. A conscious self-analysis on the way oneself is listening might be the approach, but if so, how to do it?

Listening skill

Listening skill in B language is paramount to anything else. I am glad to read in the latest delivery of the JAITS 通訳翻訳研究 a text about listening skill for the basic interpreting training by Miyuki Tanaka of 大東大文化大学. The text highlights the gap within interpretation students in Japan between the fairly advanced individuals with those with a net below required competence in their B language, especially at the listening level. As already heard around, schools of interpreting here are perceived by many as a way to beef up ones shortcomings in B language. It certainly explain why there are books here claiming to exploit "interpretation learning techniques" to grow in foreign language acquisition. The author probes into possible ways to exploit what the language trainers know about reinforcing listening competence. I too have a mix of students that all more or less struggle at various degree to understand natural French in audio format. It's a good thing for alternate interpreting trainers as stating as I do that I provide strategies to raise L2 competence from the view point of interpretation. In the text, the author refers to a set of recommendations on things to do and not to do around listening, extracted from David J. Mendelsohn's paper "Learning how to listen using learning strategies" starting on page 75. In there s stated that listening should be done using video, not audio without any clue on the reasons why. In the age of iPod, I am advocating to my student quite the contrary, that is, listen first to audio sources, and not simply from the viewpoint of portability. A quick search in Amazon shows how listening for L2 growth is not a hot topic, whereas in the classroom at least, it's hotter than the sun.

Narrow sets of skills

In a text titled "Interpreter Training at the U.S. Department of State" and published in the recently released "Interpreting and Translation Studies" of the Japan Association of Interpreting and Translation Studies, there is a list of "narrow sets of skills" covered by course segments or modules within the current practice of a seventeen week course for the Department of State. These interpreters have to deliver in any diplomatic settings so the curriculum they go through is holistic. "Liaison interpreting" is featured in the list of 16 items. It would be an overstatement to see in this burying of liaison interpreting a demonstration that as a whole, liaison is but a skill among others. It is, and it is not. It is for diplomatic interpreters. It is not for liaison interpreters. That is why liaison deserves what it is lacking so much : more visibility through more reading material not buried in academic production. Among the list, I read "Guidelines for self-study and practice" and "Terminology enhancement". I would love to hear or read on these two.

Taking care of this blog

I happen to use Bloglines to track content of blogs I like. I also track my own blog this way. Which is the reason why I know there are two readers who are tracking this blog using the same tool. That is a recent increase of one new reader. I must take care of not disappointing them. Visibility adds stress. Thanks anyway.

Meat and interpreting

We are content with what we see, with the cramped vista on the professional world. After all, what is the use of trying and know better the dynamics of the market you are swimming into? Some days you swim fast, some days you float, some days like these days, you get drown, or at least the feeling is that of a sinking ship. An epistolary conversation with A. back in France has been yet another proof of the fact that we don't know the dynamics and the differences of the markets we are trying and make a living. And we don't care, although I do. My estimate on the nationality of interpreters of Japanese-Any-other-language is 98% Japanese. It is part gut feeling, part facts. For any-other-language = French, I stick to my estimate. I have no proof that suggests a different balance. Same for English. Of course, "interpreters" in liaison interpreting come in all variety, in all competences. It has always been so. What is different is the degree of exposure. On Viadeo, a clone of LinkedIn, one young French lad exposes himself as an interpreter. He even provides in his profile page a link to a video showing himself in action. I am glad there was no Video and the Internet when I started. The professionalization of amateurishness is a worldwide core trend. The nice thing with people born in the 80s is that they are geared in such a way that anything that happened previously belongs to prehistory at best. It's good for business. The Four of Liverpool still have a future, that of being rediscovered as a new band every other generation. It's not good for business, but his competences do match the requisite of his clients. They don't ask for more. There are many clients that do not ask for more and sustain the trend that this level of competence is just enough - so why pay more for pretentious interpreters that pretend they know better and can give better service?

A. doesn't know much interpreters of Japanese in France that are not Japanese. Actually, nationality aside, he doesn't know more than 5 interpreters of Japanese. It doesn't matter to know the professional environment you are swimming in, that is, the big picture of it. The neighborhood will be enough. If you are alone, you may create a micro monopoly all for yourself. That happens when leaving in provincial areas. Knowledge of the macro structure doesn't bring home work. At least, that is the standard thinking. C. who is Japanese and living in France displayed yet another standard reflex when I started my worn out discourse on the need for same profession professionals to interact as colleagues, highlighting how much interpreters have been shunning at each others. She slapped back the invariable deeply ingrained argument : "but you are competitors!". I am eternally pissed off by that matter-of-fact characteristic that justifies the shunning out of potential professional relationship. I intend to be eternally pissed off and avoid to start thinking she might be right. How genuine she was when she told that though. They are always genuine. The weird thing is to believe that interaction is still possible within a competitive environment. My argument these days is that butchers have federations, associations of butchers. They talk there about meat, the business. Probably they don't share their secret recipe of dried sausage with pistachio. But they talk. And yet, there may be more than one meat shop in the same street. They may despise each other, but the federation is a common ground for professional dialogic civility where they can at least talk, and maybe more. This argument invariably doesn't stir even a tiny wave on the surface. After all, what is the relationship between interpreting and meat?

Getting familiar with the big picture

I will be prospecting clients at the PV Expo 2009 this week. I am doing some preparation ahead of time, getting familiar with the big picture of the subject. This is not new only I have time and I am not under pressure because I won't be doing interpretation but probe the floor for potential. Let's say you are not familiar with photovoltaic power generation, or to use another conventional expression, solar batteries. Where do you start with? Wikipedia, overview web sites, news articles. All these are valuable but pretty much scattered. A book is a more systemitized media. One nice thing with books in Japan is the plethora of books for the non-specialist at a non-specialist price. So I browsed over Amazon then grabbed my hat and went to the book store because you need to flip before you buy. In standard format, anything that is less than ¥2000 is for non-specialists. I located about 5 books for the non-specialist and simply chose the latest delivery just published a few days ago. There is no coincidence that a new book on PV is released at the time of the PV Expo. Newspapers will be hot with the subject which is indeed a hot one. I hope I can grab somme background literature at the show as well. I checked before I bought it the word index at the end because I was intended to try and make a quick homemade glossary. A too long index would be useless. But non-specialist books usually come with the right number of words in the index. It did take some time, entering about 180 words in Google spreadsheet. Now I copied the column and pasted it in WWWJDIC. It took more time from there because the pasted column was not coming with hard returns after each line, so I assume this messed up with the word recognition process. It took too much time for the cleaning but I ended up with a fairly filled up bilingual glossary. I had to check orphan words in the ALC dictionary too when WWWJDIC failed. More than once, both failed but I now have a 98% bilingual glossary with an estimated correctness rate of 75%. Now I am ready to quickly read the book in Japanese, augmented with a few magazines articles in English. Again, the purpose is to get the big picture, not to pretend acquire a doctorate level in a few days. With this preparation, I will feel confident not to get lost, show some level of understanding and hopefully start some conversations with the foreign exhibitors I will try and get in touch with to talk about their need - not at the booth - for interpretation service later on.

A fascinating read

I am reading The silver lining: Technology and self-study in the interpreting classroom, and it is fascinating. Especially the section on self-spaced short consecutive training at the Copenhagen Business School which is the focus of the article. Incidentally, it is a painful reminder at my own training environment inadequacy back in those years. Yes, there was no multimedia yet, but worse, there was no method. Anyway, now there is, and I have been more or less implementing this in the classroom without any cues that is has been done elsewhere in much more systematic fashion. It raises and clears off a lot of questions at the same time. First and at least for Japanese-English, there are more than a few resources that can be exploited right away for that very purpose. For the non-native Japanese speaker and learner, the resources are numerous on the English->Japanese side but lacking on the reverse. However, there are work-arounds. Unfortunately, the article doesn't go deep enough into the innards of the methods but a lot of it may be inferred from the hints spread here and there. One very big hint is the idea that material for self-study could be in later years be made available to the students on a remote basis, over mobile devices. I have been a proponent of feeding my students with a growing number of material to carry around between classes. More self-paced, self-monitored practices with student-trainer interaction is the future of all this, although for non-mundane learning activities as interpretation, I don't think the manual - with the included CD - will disappear from the shelf anytime soon in Japan.

More on this

Following the previous post, the major issues for specialized OPI with variable subjects and themes are both matters of interaction pattern detection/anticipation, and strategies at the preparation stage on grabbing quickly the big picture on subjects for which one may not be familiar, these strategies being implicitly guided by the forecast on possible patterns of interaction to take place during the session. The setting is an assignment in a context framed by foreseeable patterns of interaction, covering a specialized subject, with scarce if no clues on the exact requisite of one side of the people who will communicate. This happens to me most often in interview type of interactions where the interpreter is given the theme of the discussion - think about an industry name - without any list of questions or further hints on what will be asked. The literature would stress that in order to maximize the delivery of the interpreter, she needs to be provided ahead of time with enough materials and guidance. Unfortunately, the expectation in real life is for the interpreter to be ready to deliver without a clear map, and with heavy fog on the windshield. Computer aided cruising device is missing. Teaching clients what is best for them - and for the interpreter - is probably a dream never to be achieved with the macdonaldization of everything. As for patterns, for those interactions taking place within redundant frameworks, the interpreter needs to be aware of these through experience, and frame these in the mind to properly guide anticipation of what kind of questions may pop up, and follow the track of anticipation to devise the best strategy to learn ahead of time the big picture of the subject that may be new, and the possible specific sub-themes to appear in the discussion. In a conversation between an interviewer and a expert on a specific domain, chances are high that the focus of the conversation will reflect something related with current tends and events. As a matter of fact and in the context I am familiar with, skimming through news articles to know the current buzz within that theme is a requisite although the margin of anticipation error is still vast and cannot be narrowed without a list of questions. The capacity to frame the big picture of specific subjects - conversations seldom go beyond one hour - is therefore a daily concern for those interpreters involved in such type of OPI delivery. Working on the capacity to anticipate is therefore a major subject to probe into.

Preparation to technical assignments in scarce information context

I could not find a better title at this point although I already referred in the past to this issue. Many if not all the OPI assignments I am offered take place with a very scarce information context. It is not OPI for daily life services but specialized OPI. Despite this, interpreters are expected to deliver in assignments where the only verbal clue is a short sentence, a few words spelling the subject. Beyond that is the twilight zone. It goes against everything that is suggested in the literature about preparation. It puts at the risk the interpreter to deliver a less than expected level of service. The keyword behind the fact is less a matter of confidentiality than a matter of lack knowledge on the part of the intermediary about what interpretation is all about. With the recent introduction of a systematized online interface, the interpreters are farther away from interfacing with real humans on the over side, besides the clients. The super keyword that tops all others, the one tabou word is "savings", even if putting at risk quality. Despite this, and as workaround are out of reach, especially in this recession, the need for strategies to get ready in scarce information context is more than ever mission number one. There is no financial incentives to spend several hours getting ready in the mist, yet not spending time searching the subject and framing the possible scale and shape of the conversation to come is equivalent to commit suicide by starvation. Not that the scale and shape of the conversation to come cannot be etched out or fathomed, but risks are that the interpreter misses the point in anticipation outright. The equation is therefore to frame out possible scenarios, skim the subject based on these assumptions, take note of vocabulary, understand the industrial context big picture, and try and spend the least time on all this. There is a call here or spelling out strategies to get ready for the unexpected, but also strategies to frame out the salient features of a subject without expecting to get deeper into specialization. Same subjects may pop up from time to time, but usually, they come as a sweet new surprise. If it's not flexibility that is required, then there is no name for that super tender latex. I assume that some OPI practitioners in the US are seasoned experts of tactics on how to get ready for the unexpected. I have yet to read anything tangible about the subject. Probably, they are too busy and badly paid to care about spelling out the methods, and why would you spell out the methods in a throat cutting economic environment? I will come back to this subject again in the near future.

A glimpse inside the remote interpreter's den

Global Watch Tower has a post with a link to a short introduction of a remote videoconf interpreting service in the USA that provides a rare glimpse into the work environment of a remote interpreter. It may be time to invest in one or two broader screens and have all the tools (which tools?) in full view while delivering. I have yet to find any tangible description of the chores and strategies of remote interpretation. The standard mantra, "the interpreter must be knowledgeable in her specialties, fast witted" and the likes is redundantly boring. On the sideline, how does the economic slump impact the remote interpreting business?

NHK World launched

NHK launched NHK World. The site is also a gateway to all the NHK content geared at the outside world. There are legal restrictions that bar Japan to be on the receiving side of the broadcast, although content is available to some extent online. For our purpose here, the question is whether there are ways to exploit the content for multilingual purpose, that is between at least English and Japanese. Hardly so as it seems. Besides simple Japanese lessons that are not new but conveniently accessible there, Japanese language is absent.