Neutrality in interpretation is best achieved without an interpreter

Thank YOU so very much for your services yesterday... you were truly instrumental. You have no idea the impact that you provided which is something that is priceless. It was a pleasure working with you... Thank you for your professionalism... it was bar none ...

OK, this is shameless boasting, a true satisfied customer statement you can type yourself claiming you went on diet the night before and are now slimmer than ever.

But the purpose here is not boasting, truly, but pinpointing at something that appeared, at that occasion that later generated that comment (genuine, I swear), that the liaison interpreter is an enabler, an instrument of catharsis, sometimes. And this can't be let go with a mere, "so what?".

Neutrality in interpretation is best achieved without an interpreter. Or far away from a booth.

Neutrality is a consciously managed action, something done while performing, with awareness lit up. It is not pretending you are a black clad instrument like the helpers at Kabuki theater. It is instead reckoning that you are way too much visible as compared with the best situation, interaction that happens without an interpreter.

Managing neutrality is in part a matter of body movement control, but not always, controlling speed - try and deliver fast and short, and especially not interfering with the flow unless it is absolutely necessary and you believe it will make the understanding on both side better.

A conversation may start all of a sudden with a commonly known context on both sides, you the interpreter having no clue about it. You can test the following, asking someone to interpret, all of a sudden, not asking to "translate the following" because it will set the tested individual in a different mood.

"I met Mary yesterday and she was very pleased with present."

How many times have you felt even slightly to caress the break pedal because you don't know Mary, you don't know about the circumstances of giving a present, and you don't know what was in the package (and neither what was the color of the ribbon)?

Many times, students start thinking fleetingly about all these and this impairs on the speed of delivery, but also the mood, but also their competence (the lack of it) at controlling that visible frown on the face that tells "what the hell are you talking about?" Yet, you know that we know that it doesn't matter that you don't know who is Mary, what is the relationship between the people involved, why did she give a present, and whether the ribbon was stripped red and white or navy blue. It is a very easy message to be interpreted in a flash. What's more, chances are high that one side will tell you en aparté in three words who is Mary, or that further on along the path, a portrait of Mary, hints at relationships between protagonists in-situ or not will pop up in the picture. Interpreting in liaison mode is more than often also making a mental image of the various pieces of a puzzle and try make sense out of it while delivering. There are many instance pushing you to fall into the puzzlement trap, the questioning, inner or not, about who the hell are they talking about. Giving freedom to that feeling is putting your role as a communication enabler at risk.

Controlling neutrality is working hard keeping at bay all that makes you want to reach the break pedal and start talking "wait a minute, can you tell me what you are talking about, because you know I am here to help, that is granted I have at least a clue on the subject and what is at stake ... ." Because at heart you naturally want to be a participant to the interaction. Donning that unnatural role of the interpreter doesn't come naturally. Being fully aware of the fact, every time, helps switching fast to interpreting mode. Very often, it's all about awareness of the traps. Routine is the enemy. Where do you learn about composure? Not in books about interpreting as far as my readings tell, but for instance in books about ... savoir-vivre!

I remember reading somewhere a "true statement" about an interpreter praised for being "passionate" in delivering. Passion is required when the situation requires to convey passion from the speaking side. Otherwise, passion pushes you into the trap of overstretching you role of communication conduit. Keeping composure, but also giving clear clues to the talkers and listeners that you are over and that it is time from either side to go on, helping at times to push forward that shy talker whose stance may be drowned in the interaction, behaving in that instance as maître de cérémonie, a discreet actor director is all part of the show, that enhance the liaison interpreter's visibility, for the sake of better interaction.

Petit vengeance (?)

My stance has been so far that Japanese agencies don't give interpretation assignments to Westerners. There are not enough Westerners clearly designed and self-touted as interpreters here to negate the point, except for the exceptional. I know a single French national in Tokyo being a top class interpreter of all trade. I suspect another one to be. That makes a two. In some countries, it's called a throng. There must be a trickle of Westerners in niche totally undercover doing most exclusively non-simultaneous. Non-simultaneous is the massively performed technique (and that also means "situation") and the massively ignored subject - unless you happen to work for the US army in Irak or Afghanistan and get killed by your own son as it was reported some weeks ago.

You get touchy, too much, after all these years, starting from despair, moving toward self-claimed deep understanding of the ecosystem of your profession, the muck of the untold, the weight of the cream and recognized kins who pace the rules and themes of academic world. An invitation from a Japanese organization to fill a survey the other day, with the mention "only simultaneous interpreters apply", this survey being led by a mostly famous non-Japanese interpreting scholar in Europe. Anyway, what's the fuss.

I have claimed so far that local agencies as a rule don't give assignments, except for the exceptional. I have a clear memory of an agency I was involved with for +20 years that gave me an assignment, one in +20 years. The management of it was awkward enough to suffocate on it.

I now must reckon I am mongering biased information. I just now remember an assignment from a trade fair agency at a shoe exhibition in Tokyo, maybe 20 years ago. That makes two. Now, I have a third exception to log for posterity. An agency just emailed me with an offer for a two days assignment. They wanted me to come to their office to discuss it. What are the modern telecommunication technologies worth in 2010 Japan?

Anyway. They announced right away the fees. I had the immoral pleasure to answer back right away that I do not work for such fees, and that I am the one who set my fees, not my customers.

In the good times, not brilliant but good as it has not been for 6 months in a row in a long long time, you start to be pretentious. You are on the verge of forgetting the very roaring speech and definition you like to hammer on the head of others, that knowing the hardship of having no work for quite a while, the human being optimistic at boots, once you survived the despair zone (we are know flying through a despair zone, fasten your seat belt and hold on for a few years), once the better times are in until the next hole in the sky, you tend to forget not to forget to be aware of the market, you tend to forget that market scanning, understanding your professional ecosystem is never acquired, is never mathematically proven.

A tiny voice tells you in the back that behaving in such a pretentious way toward the third agency that dares and come forward to offer you an assignment, the third over 25 years, should be treated with courtoisie. After all, haven't you been reading these days books on courtoisie and politeness after all these years of ups and downs (many ups)? But no, the middleman most probably wanted to meet me and "check" if I speak Japanese among other claims (good at fixing dinner except dessert).

Some believers of fate and the voices of the unknown whisper that you will pay one day to having sent back that agency where it belongs - the mostly incompetent but can't do without band. And yet, you can't settle on the feeling of shame, whose opposite is not pride. That's for the manicheistic lot.

Talking about "know THY market", I was lured into buying (for speed) the electronic version of a book named "The entrepreneurial Linguist - The business-school approach to freelance translation". It's a broad surface scanning of things with at least a 150 pages to let go. A 20 pages book, pointed list, would have been enough, rather than skimming of the surface of things like "how to register to Facebook". There's a strategy of not showing the book index. Because the index might be enough.

I knew the book to be (so American!) yet another cool book claiming to be different just by lurking at the promo site. It's OK when you start in the profession(s), but it tells too much at face level. And misses something I have seen as crucial over the years : know Thy market, which means more precisely, develop a model that allows you to understand as best as you can the ecosystem of your profession, starting from who teach what to who, down to who does what and how job is created, passed along and filtered by who. It takes a good concept map and revisions to come up with a never perfect version. I have such concept map nurtured over some 4 years now, with the latest entry dated a few days ago. IHMC Cmap Tools is the free software. Pretty enough for the purpose and good.

It is the map of the Americas of the profession as seen from Tokyo, and still an unfinished roadmap. Nowhere in the book I read sideway (en parallèle) could I spot a clear invitation to know Thy market, and that the knowing is an endeavor over time (because the market doesn't want you to be known down to its innards).

So that makes 3 over 25 years. Not bad.

Of noise and making the best of that lingering feeling

"I would appreciate your position as a neutral party." This is a smart and sharp request from a new customer, one I have never read nor ever received so far. I could write pages on this matter but will keep quiet this time.

My understanding was that meeting would take place in a meeting room. It started in a coffee shop and ended there. Will someone give me an informed opinion on this kind of gear? Unless you have experienced it, stating that doing interpretation in a noisy environment, BGM and the likes, is hard, is only but a tiny part of the story. After 2 hours and a half non-stop, I was washed out. Ear dropping, literally cornering the ear to try and catch what they say over there at the table I am supposed to interpret is massively stressing and tiring. In a quiet meeting room, you usually don't need to over focus on hearing. Focusing is enough. In a coffee shop, standard conversation may be tiresome depending on the decibel level of the BGM and the level of each participants. But the interpreter is listening, full time, non-stop, non-stop deciphering, analyzing, grabbing context rich information in side-talks not to be interpreted to better understand what is at stake. Hearing is paramount to everything else. That's what I tell again and again at courses. But what when hearing is impaired because of the environment?

As for that lingering feeling, a white trace in a blue sky, it is both the result of sheer fatigue and the conclusion of a meeting, the standard little drama that develops each time, because things went pretty OK, the client is happy, and chances are this 2.5 hour encounter will never happen again. The unplugging when all the "arigato" are distributed, the noises of the chairs behind pushed away, and the first noise you don't care about because standard listening, which is partial listening, is now authorized. That's where the trail starts, and accelerate when you start sailing your own path back to the train station where no participant is heading. You are alone.

The standard bragging about interpreting, better than translation because when things are over, they are indeed over and you can call it quit is ... totally wrong. It's a trail and a tail at the same time. Flash reminiscences of things that took places a few minutes ago, the longing for something more especially when human contact with the client has been especially pleasurable - it does happen often. All this makes for boatload of virtual luggage your start dropping item by item as you move away from the professional scene. That's the substance of the trail.

Making the best of this time at long last alone with the self means doing a debriefing between you and you, a silenced but serious debriefing on what went OK, what went less than OK. Even if it does not transpire in this blog, because 99% of it is confidential, and because after a few stations, the mind starts focusing on the future like what to fix for dinner, it aggregates somewhere and will be of some use next time. For instance how checking the self to stick as best as possible this time to the request of keeping a neutral position, awareness in doing so, allows for further reflexion for the future about what is referred to when talking about neutrality in liaison interpreting, and more. Instead of pretending to call it quit when something doesn't want to quick, better investigate while it's hot on the (professional) meaning of it all.

Kioto and Takao

Off-subject and off-record. It takes about 60 pages to start and feel familiar with the correspondence of Ernest Satow. Familiar like family. Images form out of personal reminiscences. Kyoto, written "kioto" is too generic to stir anything sensible, but when Satow refers to Takao, on the Western side of Tokyo, it kind of lights up a sense of "hey, me too, I've been there!", although Satow refers of his never been to Takao. Despite Yedo being part of each letterhead, unless he wrote from other places, names of locations withing Tokyo are strangely scarce and I wonder why as it seems that Satow was nothing like a couch potato. The sens of place is nurtured by spelling the name of places. Learning to be familiar with a place is also learning the names of that place, districts, communities, blocks, stations, major buildings and features, etc.

But Satow was a diplomat and for the few I have known here, there knowledge of places is limited to destination's name. They are not walkers and are whisked between the embassy and destination, then back, without much than glimpses of the city that seems an ever moving target from the car's windows. Even if speed was not on par with today's sedan, I suspect Satow was a diplomat to boot (and a scholar). These people don't walk, and when as Satow they refer to their next or last trip, it's never next door or the neighborhood close by. Of course, the letters of Stow to Aston usually deal with Foreign Office personal issues and lost of scholarly concerns, writing seemingly large quantities of papers for some Asian academic associations reviews. But the fact is that Satow's letters so far are devoid of Japanese life. Only when in Bangkok, regretting Yedo, does he cover local food and drinks to mark these as ugly. A few mango fruits only get the honor. Satow is no Nicolas Bouvier, but you can't get them all.

Rôtissiers and Pâtissiers stick up to themselves

And so you must do.

Liaison interpreting is about being in the middle, physically. It is mostly performed consecutively, in what I would distinguish between short to very short dialogue interpreting (where note taking is mostly useless and impossible), and longer mono directional utterances that require consecutive interpretation and note taking.

By stating that you are not able to perform in consecutive mode, you carry along and perpetuate the bias toward consecutive (and liaison) interpreting to be inferior to simultaneous, in the sense of being a sign of a stigma, and a proof of your lack of competence.

The truth is that rôtissiers and pâtissiers do not specialize in identical realms of competence although they both practice in the realm of food.

It is better not to wait for any organizational movement that would convey a sense of self-value to liaison interpreters. Instead, behave as if you are such organization by yourself. Pat yourself on the shoulder and strive to be better, ever more professionalized. And when asked, say that you don't perform simultaneous. Stop telling you can't.

Warming up with speed sight translation

Next time, I will warm up the class with speed sight translation. This is not geared toward introductory courses of interpretation. It forces on focus and rapid delivery of equivalent words from A to B language or vice-versa, but it differs in "quick-response" type of training I noticed in several Japanese books on translation where the point is to go through a list of words. The point is not to do full sight translation but focus mostly on single words picked out of visible context. No time allowed to query dictionaries although they are freely allowed in the classroom.

Here we instead go through fast reading of some text immediately followed by a short burst of questions thrown to the student forced to sight translate selection of words or short expressions they just read aloud. The point is create stress, make them feel that flipping of words from one side to the other, think about alternate expressions or wordings, and perceive how muscling their competence also means stretching their capacity to bend and shake their passive knowledge of their mother tongue. Testing will start next week.

PS. I have noticed that 13 Google Readers users have this blog in their listings. Time for me to be serious.

Shadowing Renhô

Renhô Murata is Japan's Minister for Administrative Reforms. She is smart, prodigiously eloquent, she is the adult speaker Japanese should model after rather than buying Obama's speech on audio CDs. In this increasingly speechless society, eloquence is to be found among TV anchor people, celebrities, traditional humorous story tellers. The layman is awkward. The politician can be awfully incompetent, blurred into vagueness, hardly able to make a well constructed argument.

This puts enormous pressure on interpreting because the discourse has to be rehashed, completed, straightened up into Cartesian logic. There are still arguments that "this is the way Japanese speak because of the mysterious lingo you can't understand because you are not Japanese". But this traditional BS argument is less heard these days.

Speechlessness also impacts in tremendous way international commerce, doing business with Japan. I for one am of the opinion that this national disease of learning English and being ever incompetent at it should be taken as a major factor in the regression of Japan. But not only English, Japanese as well.

It is also the reason why I argue that unless your partner here has English palatable fluency based on enough experience of living abroad and/or interacting with foreigners, average English must be complemented by interpretation, otherwise you 'll get into trouble.

But if you are learning Japanese and want to strengthen your competence at speech, articulation of grown-up, somewhat formal Japanese, shadow Renhô by all means. I was looking to no avail something in the line of "Advanced Japanese prosody for business and formal situations", even a coach. I have found my mate.

Let's hope she leaves enough speeches around before she quits the political show, and go back to TV, where she gained as an anchorwoman, unsurprisingly, her smartness at eloquence.

Mandarin Blue : Language at Cold War

This is not a book review because "Mandarin Blue, RAF Chinese Linguists in the Cold War" has seemingly yet to be released although some reviewer got hold of early copies. A few years ago, some books were released about the US Army special crash course in Japanese language set up during the early years of WWII to try and counter the fact that almost no single US citizen was able to speak and understand the language of the enemy. The books I have somewhere piled up were not very much informative.

Mandarin Blue looks enticing, all the more after you read this article over the BBC, and this 30 minutes radio broadcast which is immensely informative and deliciously British.

These young people going to the army were saved of the barracks and lured into learning Chinese to end up in Hong Kong listening to Chinese broadcast. There are powerful hints in the audio piece at how learning a language is first and all learning to listen, which the starting point and condition of being able to interpret.

The strategic value of knowing the language, of your past enemy or partner, ever sounds as passé, when listening to the audio. Now is the good current days of learning Mandarin for the economic value of it, as it was for Japanese 30 years ago. Other wars are having language competency put at the front of strategy, although still hidden until books are written 60 + odd years after the conflict is over.

Now, how they did it without the Internet and the noise? I hope the book answers a little bit on this - the books on the equivalent story with Japanese didn't - so that I can grab some stuff and make it use in my own courses, war or not.

Loosing a potential assignment

The seasonal lack of missions over the years has already been covered somewhere else in lofty style reminiscent of farmers' talk by some conference interpreters. I have never read about loosing a potential assignment and what it feels like. It is time to create a precedent. Fees were the final issue, as reported back by the agency whose unique role would have been to cash a commission for finding me among "our worldwide team of tested interpreters", a cheese with many holes. I had never been tested nor approached by that agency before. The deal direct could have been mine. Anyway, it is still encouraging that non-Japanese agencies are potential conduits of jobs when Japanese agencies are not. What would be the commission margin of the agency? I bet something between 20 and 50%. Chances are, due to the distance between the agency and here in Tokyo that in case I would have received the job and quit in-between for some unexpected reasons, they would have been in trouble finding a back up in short time. A guild like loose organization of interpreters here would make so much sense that it is senseless it still does not exist.

So June will end up with a hole in there (in a hole there lived a Hobbit), although a few small plugs may compensate a little. Should I have reduced my fees knowing more or less about the medium market reality when dealing direct, knowing that the commission would make the offer unappealing? Should I have paid the agency by preempting the issue through voluntary regime? Where the client conscious of the role of the agency? No to everything. I know suggesting the client might be unaware that the agency's layer adds to the cost sounds a little off the board, but I would not be surprised the extend of awareness of that basic fact to be fuzzy in many cases.

Past conditional has never proved to be fruitful in anyway. Summer is hot and a time where the West, more than the East, goes on vacation mode. I only regret the part of attendance and true liaison work, besides basic interpretation, the job would have involved. That's where you try hard and fail to find a satisfactory ending phrase.

Interpreting for non-interpreters

It takes time to realize the obvious. The majority of my students are not, and won't be interpreters. They come to the course because it is highlighted both as an introduction to consecutive/liaison interpretation, and also as an unconventional means to progress with their language study. "Using interpreters training method to progress in language learning" has been a catch phrase here for several years to sell books for non-interpreters looking for different approaches to reach the skies. Shadowing is a term rather commonly used in Japan in language learning. In other countries I know about, the word in its interpreting inception is virtually unknown outside interpreting schools.

Many of my students are requested from time to time to give a hand in interpreting because the boss is French and the level of Japanese too low for the too high requirements in standards of social and business interactions here. Most of the students feel awkward and even frightened at delivering under the scrutiny of colleagues they work with on a daily basis. Colleagues are quick to judge on language competences, and shame and scorn at who knows better than thee can reach high level here.

The failing interpreter - should it be stressed that it does happen - has the advantage to leave the place once the job is performed, and repeater patrons are in my experience an exception to the rule of a one shot assignment. In this sense, non-professionals being requested to act as defacto interpreters on the job are under more difficult scrutiny and stress than freelancers. And nobody nor any book I am aware of is taking care of them. Nor any school by the way. Interpretation schools train interpreters and not "just curious about interpreting who wants to give it a shot".

I believe they are missing a slot of juicy business here in Japan where the romance of interpretation is so strong. Polluted by TV and marketing - synonymous - the belief is strong "as seen on TV" that interpreters must be rubbing elbows with the powerful and famous, that is except for the majority who work with anonymous laymen (and women). The problem would-not-be interpreters are facing is the high cost of schools and the steep level required, what with, as a rule it seems, the sense of superiority of teachers who easily despise students for not being as perfect as they are.

I have an argument here with most professional interpreters who are as more competent as they are arrogant and vicious about others, professionals or beginners as well. I have had enough feedback of this trait over the years to believe that this is no anecdotal feature.

Repackaging interpretation for non-interpreters needing to professionally deal with situations where interpretation is required is an enticing project. Encouraging students is a requisite for the empathic trainer.

Make English compulsory! And other jokes

JAPANREALTIME, a blog by journalists on Japan (is it still a blog if cooked by journalists? anyway ...). Just came with a short (it's a blog after all) piece on Money Hubs: Can Tokyo Compete With Singapore, Hong Kong? Nothing of any depth in there, but the readers reactions are quite funny. I especially loved this one :

Make English mandatory !
To illustrate this problem imagine:
- foreign and local companies which resort to hiring expensive third party interpreters to conduct business negotiations. In addition to high tax, the idea of spending a lot of money on interpreters simply kills many business initiatives
- all the low-skill jobs that have to be relegated to Japanese whose number is shrinking. It makes no sense for a company to pay a janitor the same amount of money it pays a programmer.
- all the high skilled IT people who would rather go to English speaking countries and inversely,
- all the high skilled Japanese workers (and there are so many of them) who cannot find employment overseas thus capping their salary.
- and simply all people who are deterred from spending their money in Japan because they are afraid of the language barrier. These people span from CEOs to tourists.


My two yens and free Friday advices to this comment.
Make English mandatory ! Don't count on it. It will not happen. Period.
Don't hire interpreters from agencies and save. The problem will be that many if not most interpreters sheepishly rely on agents. Look for the daring interpreters you will pay less and contract them often to turn them into your partners.
Don't blame the interpreters' costs. Pay your expats and your sales people based in or visiting Japan on results.
Don't loose steam once you leave Japan. I have seen so many businesses loosing track and the momentum inflated during meetings once the plane fly away from Narita. Do your remote homework and follow-up. Use your smart interpreter as a business enabler. Not all interpreters are able or willing to do it though. Find the one that fits and keep him/her busy with your business. It will pay down the line granted you too do your homework.
Don't expect any gizmo to replace your interpreter with a piece of hardware with a screen and battery.
And the last point : don't comment on a business, that of interpretation, you know mostly nothing about. Consult your interpreter. And if he/she has no answer to provide - the linguist robotized type of interpreter - call it quit and look for a proactive business oriented interpreter.

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Anticipation in liaison and consecutive interpretation

Conference interpreting being the king, it comes as no surprise that the matter of anticipation seems not to be covered in anyway for consecutive and liaison, beyond stressing that anticipation is important. But what is anticipation in the setting of consecutive, delayed delivery? Anticipation may directly impact the action of note taking and the balance between note taking and focused listening, because good anticipation comes with nodding, "unsurprised" as if in waiting for the implicit to be turned explicit by the speaker.

In business settings, the conditions for anticipation to work is probably directly linked to the understanding of the setting, the dynamics of business being developed and expanded, pondered and discussed It is part knowledge of the subject and part on the spot of the understanding of the inner working or the dynamics at play. It is linked to the understanding of who does what for what. Very often, and especially in Japanese as the untold part of the discourse is often different, or felt to be different, difficulties arise when the interpreter who doesn't know what happen in a previous meeting stall on a piece of information where the load of implicit is too heavy. Reframing the setting by asking for a two word briefing on the subject is the standard strategy to deliver in liaison. In consecutive, of when liaison turns into consecutive, that is, utterances go past some length I have never measured, the timing of asking for clarification the spot is more delicate to manage but mandatory all the same. It should come at the end of the utterance and be swiftly managed forcibly by the interpreter so that the break into communication flow is not felt as a big hindrance, or worse, as a suggestion that the interpreter can't do her job. Attitude is essential then and the sheepish uneasy air of a beginner interpreter (including the never-ending beginner) is one to avoid at all cost. Stealth attitude and quick crunching of whatever bits of clarification the speaker may provide is a sure way to maintain, if not raise the degree of legitimization of the interpreter. As this is jolt down while thinking, and deemed very important to me at a time where interpretation must be delivered quicker than ever, I will try later and ponder more slowly and deeper on the strategic consequences of anticipation in liaison and consecutive as well, and how anticipation could be trained beyond stressing the importance of awareness toward it.

Helping and caring for the self

I have been reading by bits "Interviewing Clients across Cultures" and praised the book over and over since last year at least. Moving out to a new house in Tokyo has messed up with habit of knowing, more or less where books that matter are thrown all over the place. The new territory helps rediscover books piled up in search of a place in the already crowded bookcase. ICC is I believe an essential piece of reading for liaison as well as community interpreters, although the author is not directing her speech at us. It is more a kind of modesty paired with keen awareness and fast adaptation that are necessary to deal with the many encounters of people and situations over job assignments. One such situation I have as usual not read about is when the interpreter is bruised or offended by what a speaker says. Supposed neutrality is a matter of keeping balance and focusing onto the single act that matters, i.e. that communication gets going on. Today was such an opportunity to test a badly felt situation of cultural arrogance on one side, utterly misunderstood on the other side. When Japan stance of superiority meets Japan enamoured Westerner. It can turn sour but to the mind of the interpreter who secretly thinks having spent years after years of pondering the claims, brought into pieces patterns and motives of claiming superiority of this over that. Love of Japan by Westerners goes against the very definition of ethnocentrism. It's a game of self-depreciating, of yearning for the other. But the interpreter interprets. Dealing with the sour taste actually comes later on, when the party is over and farewell scenes are over. Self-help for post-interpreting syndrome is a competence to be nurtured with books that do not talk about interpretation, as these do not talk about such matters. The paucity of writings about what the job is effectively on the job is in fact hardly understandable. That's where practitioners could make a different by writing more about the job in action, and expanding from anecdotes to deeper stuff.

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Calling for help, and gasping for air

"All of our interpreters are bilingual/bicultural professionals trained to perform several complex tasks: listen to the speaker, analyze a fleeting and yet real message in its entirety, interpret the message into another language, preserving the characteristics of form and substance inherent in another culture. We have interpreters proficient in medical, legal, business, government and insurance terminology as well as many other terminologies."

SOS Talk!! pushes forward the fantasy that interpretation can reach appropriate level of ... what else? appropriateness, by just calling the service and snap an interpreter ready to deliver on the spot without a single clue about the setting. It's all a matter of context, the context, stupid!

The technology gets rid of the call center to get in a touch with a smiley, young and happy competent interpreter, happy to get paid at best 1 dollar per minute - my guess. The stock photography, the bakelite blond delivering the marketing tune, everything is familiar with standard cheap and fake.

- Hi! we're just in the middle of a discussion with a potential customer for a multibillion dollars contract. Our interpreter onsite just ran away. Can you help? It's very easy. We are talking about ethylene glycol. Are you familiar with ethylene glycol?
- Sure, I had some for breakfast. Go ahead.
- OK, gentleman, we now have an interpreter online. Ok, so let's get briefly back to the issue. As I said, Ethylene glycol is widely used to inhibit the formation of clathrates in long multiphase pipelines that convey natural gas from remote gas fields to an onshore processing facility. Ethylene glycol can be recovered from the natural gas and reused as an inhibitor after purification treatment that removes water and inorganic salts.

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Building professional common visibility

Besides weird, clearly inappropriate inquiries and request for services, I have long been uneasy when not able to say yes and leave the inquirer alone finding for an alternative resource. There is a strategy behind offering to introduce someone else that goes beyond simply being nice. In fact, there is a strategy beyond niceties that is less related with the hope that by passing along assignments to you might make you think about me when you have an assignment on your hands you can't take care of. It has more to do with letting an imprint in the mind of the service requirer that I was the guy who decline but found a spare wheel. Sometimes, somewhere in the future, it might help my business further along the line. Don't smile at that pure ingenuity. There is no mercy but an intend devoid of goodwill for goodwill. A virtuous circle in this profession, as a non-Japanese in Japan, could expand the potential to yield more job opportunities although the naysayers will doubt or deny. Freelancers are weathermen, and women. Only they don't release reports but basks under the sun, or feel gloom under the rain. I used to do so, so I know and might come back to the old black or white pendulum movement with nothing in between, and nothing beyond. Unsecured by the knowledge that today's assignment, and the satisfaction to have one's gears used for service and generate revenues might stop tomorrow, I have only seen in the mirror and beyond people content to have been under a continuous stream of steady assignments, or at odds in face of crisis and long term low tide employment. Smile or cry. It is true that assignments are part of a serendipity dynamics no science may explain the innards of. Sheer lucky encounters may explain part of the assignments I got since January. But there are elements that suggest not all of this is linked to luck. It has to be seasoned with a pinch a strategy to help the odds fall down on the bright face. This blog is part of a strategy to spread wider the net of my professional web site and be caught rather than catch into the dynamics of businesses coming to Japan and needing the very services I provide. Somewhere else, an other blog unrelated with this profession has brought examples of encounters that transformed into assignments and jobs opportunities. I have seldom seen cooperatives of interpreters online. I have never seen any example of networked interpreters or translators with a strategy of common visibility. There are associations of same profession people having private mailing list, a window on the Internet to recruit, regular meetings here and there that nurture over time a web of relationship where exchange of work opportunities do happen. They even carry for some a public directory of members. But that's as far as group promotion can go. I think that there are further domains and strategies to boost market creation beyond the standard scenario for small knit gathering of professionals to be tested, that rely on the will of members to abide to a small set of rules over time. One such experiment due to be launched but facing the standard reluctance of freelancers is to build visibility around a common web site attached to a blog regularly fed by members, feeding the blog being a condition to be part of the scheme. It has yet to get born.

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Back to magazines subscription

Reading so much on the screen has brought forward a personal phenomenon over the years publishers might take notice of, although it must be already too late for them. The phenomenon I am referring to here is going back to subscription and paper. I am now subscribed to two US and three French magazines. Sorry for Japanese magazines but the lameness of these make reading for free on screen a better deal.

Not that reading on screen has receded in the background, but the portability and the focus that paper allows can't be beaten. That's just when Apple released the iPad in Japan. The magazines publishers' association here have a promotional week when they entice people through posters in the subway to read magazines. The stance, vague, targeted at young women, fashionable, has been meek and lousy over the years. It may not generate a large enough readership to justify focusing the promotional message on exactly that, get focused, also read paper magazines. But the appeal must be obvious to some readers. One "function" that paper can't be beaten at is flipping back to where reading stopped. I never go back to ... on screen, even if using state of the art "read letter" services. Things to be read later never get read but swamped in oblivion because speed and being ahead matters most.

Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, interprète, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, japonais, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator