It’s a Team Sport
The Not so Secret Ingredient in Anything Multilingual
One time, I was interpreting for a new end client. One of my favourite remote interpreting platforms had asked me to work for them and I was happy to help. But that’s where things started to go wrong.
How to be bad at being multilingual
The first red flag was that we were expected to interpret for two days with just a single PowerPoint and a changing schedule to go on. The second red flag was that we were asked to start in the middle of a day, giving us no background or context. Finally, every speaker seemed to have received a memo to speak extremely quickly.
Not good. Not good at all.
The anatomy of getting it wrong
The issues with that particular event are far from a one-off. All too often, people expect interpreters to be human dictionaries, with access to all the terminology from every field and the ability to understand any accent with ease.
Needless to say, that just isn’t realistic.
It all comes down to a single issue: teamwork. When people assume that language stuff will work no matter what, they tend to be slapdash with their preparation and leave gaps in communication. It might just be that they are in a hurry or it could be that the real issue is that languages are not important to them.
But the fact is that nothing multilingual works well without thought, preparation, and time. It takes time to build a multilingual church. It takes time to prepare for an interpreting assignment. It takes time to write a useful brief and to send documents.
The biggest success factor
This is why it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the biggest factor in the success of multilingual churches and multilingual meetings is the relationships between the people delivering multilingual events and churches and the people in charge of the organisation. Send documents to translators in good time and with good briefs and you get good translation. Run everything through Google Translate at the last minute and the results will not be good.
The same applies to every aspect of being multilingual. Relationships really matter and they determine how good the end result will be.
In the next post, we will talk about building relationships in interpreting. The last post of this month will discuss the importance of relationships in multilingual church.