#translators problems

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

Alternatively, imagine being a talented young writer (!) and all of a sudden another great writer chooses you personally (!!) to translate their work into your language (!!!) because they think you’re the best person to do that (!!!!) and then you’re forced to resign because an internet mob says you’re not the ‘right race’ for the job.

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.