Moving context

Liaison interpreting is all about context. You read about it in the academic papers. I shall add an important discovery - coming to awareness may be more appropriate - to the mantra. It is the fact that the context is not fix, it moves. And that movement resembles actually the pealing of an onion. Liaison interpreting gets all the more difficult to deliver and confuses the interpreter that the context during briefing didn't drill down the layers of the onion but stayed at a superficial level. Strangeness of context doesn't come naturally to someone who is already bathing in the contextual pool. There are good and bad explainers of context. The bad explainer is a client who will deliver in lofty manners what she considers to be enough to understand the situation. It may sound good for a beginning but on the field, it will reveal as patchy and a trap for false conjecture and interpretation by the interpreter. The interpreter understanding that there are additional layers of context under the one he was fed with has now to frantically pedal back, veer toward the right way while looking cool, composed and in control. I always tell my students that beyond interpreting is the simultaneous controlling of many switches and gears, one being the control of uneasiness, or worse, shame, as you and the people around discover that you, the interpreter, was wrong. Failure to correctly interpreter may be the responsibility of the interpreter. It may also be the result of confusions and false conjectural thinking and conclusion by the interpreter trying and make sense alone to stitch together the patching of meanings, or plug the holes. Yesterday's onion was deep an utterly black down there, on the Japanese side. I don't want to suggest that things are always clear on the opposite, non-japanese side, but as far as layers of onions are concerned, the Japanese side is made out of many more layers on average. And as with yesterday's client, briefing proved highly inadequate to what happened.