#interpreters problems

Me waiting for the right moment to mention everything is online because we’re in the middle of a global pandemic:

Hi! No problem! I think it’s a bit of everything, tbh. I’ve always been interested in Persia because I studied Greek Archaeology and was (am) an Alexander stan, so I got to know ancient Persia through his eyes and I was fascinated by the awe and respect he had for this culture which was way older than his own. But also, when I trained as an interpreter I wanted to do some good in the world - and I studied hard for four years only to realize I had the wrong languages and couldn’t actually help anyone. So I sent an email to my government like ‘Hey, which languages do you need for humanitarian work?’ and basically the answer was a list of twenty languages and man, 16 of them were unlearnable (no textbooks or dictionaries, random dialects and the like), while 3 other were spoken in countries I felt I didn’t ‘click’ with. Which is possibly very stupid of me, but learning a language takes so much effort, it’s hard to find the willpower if you’re not that curious about the people and the culture. And then, number 20 was Farsi - spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, so likely to be useful for humanitarian and diplomatic reasons both now and in the future, Indo-European (which means no funny business grammar-wise), enough learning resources to make it realistic, and a rich literature/history to boot. So it’s probably madness, but I bought a couple of textbooks and here we are.

فارسي آسان نيست ، اما زیباست

Hi there! Thank you for this question - this is something I used to wonder myself before intepreting school, and I have to say - knowing how this works doesn’t make it a lot easier to a) actually do it and b) understand how any brain could possibly do it? Because it’s hard enough to interpret between European language, which are sometimes a bit different in word order and general worldview, but those people who work with non-related languages and have to shift cultural perspectives on the spot - that takes some real talent. 

So - how do you deal with a difference in word order? Rule of the thumb is, ‘With care, with practice, and ideally with some good fucking luck’. 

There are some techniques you can use to reshape your sentence, and if you listen to a lot of intepreters, you might start to hear them. One method consists in starting your own sentence with a question: ‘What do we know about turtles? Well - turtles are so very cute...’ - when you hear something like this, it’s very likely the original language went something like ‘Turtles [gibberish] [gibberish] [gibberish] very cute’, and since the gibberish doesn’t translate to your own language, you’re forced to wait for the actual information. Or you can say, ‘When it comes to the subject of turtles...’ as a way of waiting for what comes after. In some cases, you can even switch out verbs: for instance, I work with German, and very often the key verb - and the element telling me whether the sentence is positive or negative - is at the end. What this means is that if the original sentence goes ‘The Commission’s vote determined turtles are indeed very cute’, I might have to offer something like ‘The Commission voted on the issue of turtles and their cuteness: the conclusion is, they are indeed very cute’. So, you see, I gained those two seconds in the beginning to avoid being blindsided by a final ‘cute they are NOT’, which would have derailed my entire sentence.

Of course, if the conversation or speech is not too quick, there’s nothing wrong with waiting and leaving a second of silence until you can hear the entire sentence. The only danger with that is that the more you wait, the more out of synch you are with the speaker, the more difficult to repeat everything they’re saying without leaving key details out.

So here is the general theory; it does take a lot of practice to handle these techniques in a way that makes sense. I only have experience with German myself - it must be a nightmare to do simultaneous interpreting from a language that’s even more different from your own.

1. Japanese is the fastest recorded language. It has a rate of 7.84 syllables per second. 

2. Spanish is right behind Japanese and is nearly as fast with a rate of 7.82 syllables per second. 

3. French lags just a little far behind with a rate of 7.18 syllables per second. 

4. Italian is relatively slower than Spanish and French with a rate of  6.99 syllables per second. 

5. English is among the slower languages with a rate of 6.19 syllables per second. 

6. Before last is German with a speed of 5.97 syllables per second. 

7. Mandarin is the slowest recorded language with a rate as low as 5.18 syllables per second.

Alan Wendt on his job as Jacinda Ardern’s interpreter