Part I: What are interpreters doing when they interpret?
It sounds straightforward enough. Interpreters take what is said or signed in one language and then say or sign the same thing in another language. That one phrase hides a lot of complexity. How do interpreters do that? How do we know when they are saying the same thing? How can interpreters keep doing that well? And how does all this apply to church?
This series will answer those questions by going over the basics of church interpreting: from what interpreting is and the basic techniques, all the way through to checking your own performance and keeping on improving. Let’s start with the most basic question: what do interpreters do while they work?
Interpreters don’t work one word at a time
Weirdly enough, one very practical place to start is to realise that interpreters are certainly not looking up each word in a dictionary and saying or signing them one at a time. A lot of people who first try to do interpreting get this idea that interpreters are just walking dictionaries and that, if you know all the words, you can interpret fine. That doesn’t work.
If you want to know why that doesn’t work, this old video from the Inside Interpreting channel give a brief explanation. The upshot is that, as soon as people can use language fluently, they move away from processing it one word at a time.
Here’s are a few simple examples. How many of these sentences can you read? How many have mistakes in them?
If you cna raed tihs snetncee, yuor brian is ogod at pdrecitnig wrdos.
This sentence cntains tehree mitsakes.
The human brain can even replace a little bit missing information.
For these next three sentences, I will give you the start of the last word of the sentence. See if you can work out which word it should be.
The volcano suddenly started to er…
In one classroom, the teacher taught twenty st…
Recently, I became the father of a newborn ba…
I am confident that no one filled in those words as “erudite”, “stools”, and “barbarian”. For those of us who use English fluently, that second exercise was easy as we know how those sentences should end. The first exercise may have been tricky but it is common for people to be able to unscramble those sentences, just from the clues available.
Applying this to Interpreting
All of this might seem pretty far from interpreting but many of the same skills you used in those exercises are used all the time in interpreting. Interpreters can interpret, even with some level of background noise or imperfect audio. They can predict the end of sentences and fill in information. They can even find the right version in their language, even when what they saw or heard didn’t have all the information their language needs to produce a full sentence. At least, they can do all that most of the time.
Interpreters don’t work one word at a time primarily because people don’t process language one word at a time.
This might seem like a theoretical place to start our discussions of the basics of church interpreting but it is an important one. It is also an insight that is going to completely change your interpreting and make your work much easier, not to mention more effective.
The aim of church interpreting is not to give a word for word version of what was said or signed in the other language. The aim of church interpreting is to get across the meaning of what was said in the other language, using the appropriate phrases, expressions, and terms from the language you are interpreting into. There is one more layer to this.
Interpreting honours people and honours God
So far, we have just touched on the language part of interpreting. What makes church interpreting so powerful is that the language aspect isn’t everything.
Church interpreting is first and foremost something we do for God. We have no space for pride or for self-indulgence. It isn’t about us looking good or about finding the most eloquent phrase. Church interpreting is God’s idea and it is God’s evaluation of our work that ultimately matters. Your prayer life, your relationship with God and the honour you give to the Word of God will come out in your interpreting.
The second audience is the people who will be hearing or seeing your interpreting. If those people don’t understand what we’re saying or signing or worse, if they misunderstand, we’ve done our job wrong. We are not looking for the once-and-for-all-time perfect meaning. We are trying to help these people understand and respond to what is being said or signed in another language. That means taking intelligent decisions as to what and how to interpret, when to explain and when to leave stuff out. It also means