About interpreting

This week marks twenty-five years that I have been working as an interpreter.
I started in March 1983 having completed my six month training course (stage) with the European Commission’s Joint Interpreting and Conference Service (SCIC). The SCIC provides interpretation at meetings organized by both the Commission and Council of Ministers. It is, by the number of languages it provides, the meetings it services and interpreters it employs (staff and freelance), by far the biggest interpreting service in the world. I was trained by professional working interpreters who would soon be my future colleagues. It was very effective hands-on training tailored to the needs of SCIC. They paid for your training, and if you were successful you had to work for them for at least a year. It was a golden opportunity that now belongs to a past era: free training and a guaranteed job! I don’t think I would have stumbled into the interpreting profession otherwise.
I had actually interpreted before, without knowing it, while being a leader on international youth camps where somebody had to repeat the announcements in another language. So I took to it fairly naturally, I have a good ear and a good memory, and discovered I rather liked it. And here I am still twenty-five years later.
A lot has changed of course over the years. When I started there were 10 member states and 7 languages (French, German, English, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Greek). Now there are 27 members and 22 languages (I won’t list them). I hasten to add that not all the languages are spoken in all the meetings, most often far fewer. For that reason, in the 1980’s I spent most of my time interpreting non-native French, now I spend most of my time some days sitting listening to non-native English - a somewhat frustrating experience to say the least. That’s because when they speak English in the meeting room we don’t interpret in the English booth. I work into English, my mother tongue, from French, German, Italian and Spanish. I started with French and German, which I had studied at university, and added Italian around 1990 and Spanish in 1995. I haven’t felt the need to learn another language to professional level (although it would please my boss), I find it enough to do keeping on top of the four I have. As part of my job I also teach and test would-be interpreters, which gives me an opportunity to reflect on the nature of what we do.
Most of our interpreting is in simultaneous. We sit in a sound-proofed booth with a window onto the meeting room. When someone speaks into a microphone in the room we hear him over a head-set and interpret that straight into our microphone with a delay of a few seconds. The delay represents the time necessary to understand a complete unit of meaning (phrase or sentence) and to process it (translate/edit/rephrase it into natural sounding English). As you start to speak your version, you are already at the same time listening to and processing what comes next, which you then start to speak and so on. There are three things going on in your head simultaneously. That’s not something that comes naturally and it’s a trick you have to learn.
Occasionally we interpret in consecutive. This usually is the case where the complicated infrastructure of the booths and sound system is not available, eg in the middle of a field (that’s not a joke, I’ve done it on agricultural trips), or where it’s not really worth the effort to set it up, eg for a short after dinner speech in a château. In consecutive, first the speaker speaks (sometimes for several minutes) and then the interpreter. That might sound easier, but you’ve got to remember everything he’s said. So we take notes that will help us reproduce the speech, but we are largely dependent on our memory and if we’re out of practice (which is usually the case, given how little we do it these days) it can be nerve-wracking.
Either way, interpreting is about communicating. In effect we have to become the speaker and give his message with as much conviction, humour, emotion or whatever. There’s a bit of the ham-actor in many an interpreter, but you mustn’t overdo it. You must be true to the orignal, so if the original is bland and boring, then so are we.
People nearly always ask the same questions about interpreting, so I’ll answer a few FAQs for you.

What do you do if you don’t know a word ?
You leave it out. Golden rule n°1 is “If in doubt, leave it out”. You should only say what you’re sure you’ve understood - otherwise you could be in deep trouble if you make something up. Sometimes of course you just mishear a word thinking it’s another and say something rather stupid in the context. Oh yes - we’ve all been there and laughed about it afterwards! The chances are the word you didn’t know, you actually did but didn’t recognize it. If it’s important, it will come round again; speakers tend to repeat themselves and you may get it the second time. If it persists and you still don’t know it, like the name of a fish species, you better track it down fast in the document you’re discussing or in your specialized glossary, if you’ve got one. And if all else fails you’ll have to admit and say you don’t know it, adding what it is in the source language. If it’s really technical the delegate probably has heard of it, foreigners for example use English technical words the whole time (often that’s the word you didn’t understand in the first place as it was mangled in a foreign pronunciation - but oddly enough that’s always the one word your delegate did recognize in the original). Usually the odd word you don’t know here or there doesn’t matter. Interpreters, after all, are in the business of communicating the ideas rather than the words. The worst kind of interpretation is a never-ending string of words that may each individually equate to what’s in the original but don’t actually hang together in a coherent message that enables your customer to follow what the other delegate’s point is and allows him to react to it. In fact that’s not really an interpretation at all, but a rather poor literal translation.

Could a machine do your job?
No. I think I’ve just explained why. The day they replace the interpreters with machines, they will have replaced the delegates with robots the year before. You need a human being to understand the vagaries of the human thought process, as reflected in the speech of most mortals.

What do you do if you make a mistake?
All interpreters make mistakes, they are only human. If you realize you have and it matters then you should correct it as soon as possible. If you've not realized, maybe because you translated in good faith something you misheard and didn't get a chance to put it right, then you will have to apologize.

Can you alter what a speaker says to change the outcome of a meeting?
Why would you want to? People aren’t daft, when the chairman sums up, they’d just say “No, I didn’t say that”. You’d have to keep on inventing the whole time like a bad liar, and believe me you’ve got enough to do as it is. Anyway, in a multilingual meeting with several parallel versions, you’d have to make sure everyone was doing the same - impossible. Just stick to the truth.

What do you do if someone says something rude or that you strongly disagree with?
The same applies. Stick to the truth Your customer has a right to know just how objectionable the speaker is.

Isn’t it tiring ?
Well it is. That’s why we have a whole series of time rules that meetings have to respect so the interpreters get sufficient breaks to stay on form. Generally speaking, there are at least two interpreters in a booth and you change over after half an hour. The tiredness creeps up on you insidiously, in the adrenalin rush of interpreting you don’t notice it, it hits you afterwards. It’s not a job you can do 9 to 5 every single day of the week, week in week out. Having said that, staff interpreters at the SCIC probably do work more days in the booth in a year than anywhere else. I myself arrange to take a month of unpaid leave in the summer to fully recharge my batteries.

How can you cope with all those languages ?
In meetings with a large number of languages, there are three of us (each having say four languages) so that we stand a better chance between us of covering more languages directly. Inevitably even then, there are some languages we don’t know and we have to use relay, which is polite for double translation or Chinese whispers (eg someone does Finnish into French and then we do that French into English). That first step with all the new and little known Eastern European languages often takes the form of a “retour” eg a native speaker of Lithuanian putting their own language into eg non-native French. Most of these retours are into English. However, most interpreters still work most of the time into their mother tongue (in my case that’s all I do). As a corollary of all of this, when delegates can’t listen to their own language, they tend to listen to English instead. In a recent survey we discovered that only 15% of those who listen to the English booth are native speakers. Even in a meeting with all the languages, our colleague non-English interpreters will be listening to us to take a relay. This has meant that in the English booth we have had to clean up our act for foreign consumption. Even without dumbing it down too much, we must try to e-nun-ci-ate and cricket metaphors are definitely out (not that I ever used many anyway). It’s sad really, but that’s our demand, no cozy two way relationship for us as between the Danish booth and their delegates.

Have you ever worked for anyone famous ?
Over the years I’ve worked for everyone from trades unionists to prime ministers. I’ve worked for many of the famous European politicians. and public figures Though confidentiality rules forbid me from sharing any tasty titbits with you, I can tell you that it’s interesting to see these people in the flesh and you soon develop your likes and dislikes. But most of the time I work for civil servants, that is people who represent their country at European level meetings, which is why we loosely call those attending meetings “delegates”.

Do you understand all the subjects you interpret ?
Yes, superficially at least, if not fully. SCIC interpreters are expected to do meetings on any subject. Over the years it’s not just the number of languages in the EU that has increased but also the areas of business. We have to do everything from setting fish quotas to checking countries’ budgets meet their euro obligations, to classifying footwear for customs purposes, to stopping foot and mouth disease from spreading, to agreeing how to use the European arrest warrant in practice, to working conditions for lorry-drivers, to whether or not to recognize Kosovo’s independence etc etc. Just about anything and everything you can think of. It’s safe to say you learn something new at work every day and have to, if you’re going to grasp the point someone’s trying to make. It’s one of the aspects of the job that keeps it interesting. I always say there are three levels to understanding what’s happening in a meeting: linguistic - you understand the words; technical - you understand how what they are talking about works; political - you understand what is at stake and why countries are taking the positions they do. You have to understand linguistically to do the job and can sometimes get away just with that, but it makes everything much easier if you also understand technically. Sometimes from your background knowledge and even from what more candid delegates say, you may understand politically and that can make a meeting very interesting to observe.

It’s not actually one of the FAQs but I’ll answer this one:
What’s the best thing about the job?
The answer is quite simply - the colleagues. Interpreters are by definition people who speak several languages, have experience of several different cultures, have lived abroad and travelled widely. They come from many different countries and backgrounds and have a wide range of interests. They frequently have many hidden artistic talents. It’s a privilege to work alongside so many interesting and gifted people. Also you work with different colleagues every day so you don’t get bored with them. In fact, my wife is a colleague and so are many of my best friends in Brussels. Interpreting also requires teamwork: in the booth itself the three of us have to agree how to divide the work fairly and help each other find documents and equivalents of technical words; then all the booths together have to work as a team in the meeting, especially with many relays. That teamwork brings an “esprit de corps” which is further enhanced when we have to travel together, not always in easy conditions.

All in all, even after twenty-five years, I still enjoy the job. Of course, like any other job, there are a fair number of dull days for one reason and another, but the good days more than make up for that. It’s never easy, I can never do it just on auto-pilot. Moreover, there is no such thing as a perfect interpretation, which is humbling. In fact it’s one of the most challenging intellectual exercises I know and as such fun. But it also serves a purpose, which is to allow people to communicate and when I see that I have enabled that, it gives me great satisfaction. It’s not a job that would suit a lot of people, being no more than a glorified parrot, but it’s fine with me. Being on the job requires maximum concentration. It’s also a performing art with the special adrenalin that brings.
The big advantage is that when it’s over, it’s over: I’m free to get on with the rest of my life. I don’t require the illusion of self-importance that comes with some jobs in which in reality you’re only a small cog in someone else’s big machine, though exhausting your life energy doing it. I definitely work to live, not the other way round.
It also happens to pay well, but I think I’d do it anyway for the stimulus and the company.