Ability to captivate an audience

An interesting presentation yesterday at the monthly JAT meeting. I went because there was the word interpreting in the session name. Opportunities to hear about interpretation from practitioners beyond the standard local lip service are so rare. The presenter was a bilingual Japanese engineer. I was both glad and unsurprised that his presentation covered practical aspects of the job you usually do not hear or read about from the conventional shut clams that are Japanese interpreters.

One remark about his role of interpreter cum moderator during negotiations stroke a strong chord when he remarked apologetically that this may not be the job of an interpreter. This role of cultural negotiator as well as communication flow and dynamics moderator and controller was somewhat strangely coined with the inadequate (to me) expression "Ability to captivate an audience". I would rather call this role that is not permanent during the exchange as the competence equivalent to the flight controller. The interpreter must not be the pilot but a flight controller and path discreet fine tuner on top of the standard linguistic agent.

My own experience is that clients - mine have always been non-Japanese - will always appreciate you do not behave as a simple conduit but as a broker, moderator, communication flow (as flight) controller. In such situation where temperature rises and harsh words start popping up, when people do not wait for the interpreter but jump in-between to tell their stance with emphasis, the interpreter not able to go beyond the mere role of linguistic agent and grab for a short while the plane stick will be wiped out and her lameness exposed.

Extracted from the article "Community Interpreting : Re-conciliation through power management, Raffael Merlini, Roberta Favaron"

"a clear illustration of the
interpreter's cultural brokering and advocacy functions, as cited in Giovannini
(1992) and reported in Roberts (1997: 26), is the Cultural Interpreter Training
Manual issued by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship. Listed among the
interpreter's roles and responsibilities are the following: to explain cultural
differences and misunderstandings; to advise the client about rights and options;
to ensure that the client has all relevant information and controls the interaction;
to explain what may lie behind the client's responses and decisions; to challenge
racially/culturally prejudiced statements or conclusions; to identify and resolve
conflicts. When the interpreter is called upon to concentrate on the last of the
above points, advocacy gives way to conciliation, a function which, according
to Diane Schneider of the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department
of Justice, "is performed more frequently than one might imagine, without being
defined as such" (1992: 57).
Leaving aside, for the moment, the latter approaches which allow no
ambiguity as to the nature and scope of the practitioner's role, but are considered
by many to fall outside the range of interpreting proper, and looking at the more
canonical landscape of normative literature, one cannot fail to recognise the
relevance to today's situation of the comment made in the late 1970s by
Anderson that "the interpreter's role is always partially undefined – that is, the
role prescriptions are objectively inadequate" (1976: 216). "