Interpreting is about much more than interpreters
It's about time we faced the audience in the room
Everything was ready. The booths were resplendent in shining beige. Their coat-hooks had been shined to perfection. The consoles were the latest model, from the latest brand. The Perspex was cleaned to the point where you couldn’t even tell it was there. The power sockets were gleaming and there were even eight of them! High-speed internet was piped in via a reliable Wi-Fi and using the fastest cables known to humankind. Free pastries and coffee lined the spaces on the table that weren’t taken up with notes or laptops. And the mics. Oh, you should have seen the mics! One for each interpreter, unidirectional, with noise cancelling and just the right amount of filtering. It was sheer opulence – a palace of professional wordsmithery.
Except there was a catch. With all the emphasis on building the perfect booth, no-one had remembered to bring any headsets for the delegates and no-one had thought to actually link the booths to any other means of broadcasting the output at all. Sure, the booths were perfect but absolutely no-one had any way of hearing what the interpreters were saying. They were perfect for interpreters but absolutely useless for the people who actually needed interpreting.
Of course, that would never happen in real-life, right?
Keeping the right focus
We would all laugh at the absurdity of building perfect booths and not connecting them to the outside world. But I sometimes wonder whether we interpreters can sometimes make similar decisions. If we know that booths need to be connected to the outside world and people need a way to hear or see our interpreting, surely we should remember the need to keep our own focus on the people who will receive our interpreting.
We touched on this last month in the discussion of “accuracy”. Not long after that, I wrote an article for the German Conference Interpreters’ Association explaining the difference between accuracy and effectiveness with this drawings.
The point is and always will be that we cannot and should not measure the success of interpreting in terms of how accurate it was to the original speech but how well it worked for everyone concerned. Interpreting is, after all, a partnership. We need people to express themselves clearly and who want to be understood. This involves providing preparatory materials, talking to us about the event and even, although this is often rare, being involved in debriefings afterwards so we can get feedback on our performance.
But we also need audiences who want to understand, who are paying attention, who are actually engaged and crucially, who put on headsets or look at the screen.
Interpreting isn’t what interpreters do alone. It’s what everyone does together.
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