A common language ...

An article in the Financial Times Asia dated February 2 by journalist Alicia Clegg ponders on "A matter of interpretation".

It comes with standards as well as seldom heard about recommendations about ways to select an interpreter for business.

Some highlights.

"Telling colleagues to change the entire way they work is one of the hardest things a manager has to
do. Saying it through an interpreter is even harder. "

Unless you expose your interpreter with what's your purpose, objectives, what you want to take home, what's the message you want to imprint in their minds. The single deficit liaison interpreters may be commonly facing is less a matter of vocabulary but a matter of context scarcity. Sure, interpreters are the first culprit not asking enough their customers for background information ahead of time, not questioning them between session to clarify the big picture. Although context is the essential framework for liaison interpreting to effectively liaise, there is a limit to try and get the client fully understand the needs of the interpreter to deliver optimal services. And yet, the interpreter must stand for her job and technic, and turn clients into partners.

"That was the task faced by Gaëlle Olivier, vice-president of communication at Axa Group, the French
insurance company, when she was sent to Japan to shake up a struggling subsidiary. The local
managers, she says, "urgently needed to change their product offer, revisit their investment strategy
and become more innovative and less hierarchical". A tough message was made trickier to deliver by
the lack of a common language. "

I am not alone thinking these days that the common language they are writing about, all those journalists, is not what you may think. It is not English. Because even when delivered in English to Japanese somewhat fluent, more time than you may believe, it doesn't go through. "It", being "the meaning". There is more than often an obvious lack of common ground, that is, a deeper gap than the mere issue of common language. The gap is more of a rhetorical kind, that is, the dimension where things simply get lost is due to huge lack of understanding of the differences in rhetoric at stake. It's by far an issue of bandwidth, frequency difference. Even K. who is 100% Japanese agrees based on her daily routine that a large majority of the staff where she is working, despite their average or better English reading competency, simply don't get the point of most messages sent from non-Japanese. They don't get it. Too big a subject to ponder about here. But the interpreter may have a bigger role between Japanese and Western language than what is usually attributed to her.

"But can managers who use interpreters be sure that what their audience hears is what they really intended to
say?"

No. Period. And I skip the issue of a majority of people - including myself - not top class talkers. In natural conversation, few are clear as the discourses they use in interpretation schools.

"Someone who is fresh out of school may not be as good as someone with no qualifications and years
of experience,"

Thank you, I agree.

" in Japan. "If you are hiring interpreters, my advice is to talk to other businesses and to get recommendations."

Good advice, but why limit this to Japan? But knowing that most interpreters are delivered here by agencies and many interpreters are hooked to agencies, how are you, the customer, to get in touch with that interpreter other businesses recommend?

"Culture plays a huge part in the success or failure of interpretation, because the cultural assumptions
that come bundled with words may literally not translate. "

You could not tell it better. Cultural competency is not totally reflected in language competency. No school teaches cultural competency.

"Ms Olivier was sometimes told that a task would be " muzukashii ". Her interpreter translated this as "difficult", which Ms Olivier took to mean tough but do-able. Only when her team repeatedly missed deadlines did she begin to understand that
muzukashii is a cultural euphemism for saying "It is impossible and we cannot do it."

I tested my students the other day, asking them how they would translate muzukashii into French. None came with the idea to tell the gaijin that what they mean is "impossible". So they would all fail at interpreting. You have carloads of interpreters ready to translate muzukashii by difficult and any other cousins. But it takes, and it took me time too (I am not immune) to understand that the gaijin side must absolutely be not entertained with the "subtleties" of the language, but be informed in a way that allows him to implement a forward strategy, which is to ask why it is impossible, and not what are the difficulties. Because asking about the difficulties will put the Japanese side into the obligation to deliver mumbo jumbo meaningless straights of verbal emptiness, for they basically don't understand why the gaijin is asking about those difficulties meant to mean "no way". They usually are as culturally incompetent as the gaijin side. Which points to cultural competence as being a key factor of interpretation.

"The power dynamic between speaker, interpreter and listener presents another set of challenges. Ms
Sebastian has spent 20 years working for western companies in Asia. She says executives who are
unused to interpreters often make the mistake of looking at the interpreter instead of building a rapport
with their opposite number through eye contact."

The interpreter is responsable to teach on the spot the client how to behave and watch the opposite side while talking. The client is responsible to behave or not the way the interpreter tells her to do.

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