Master Lankenau
Certified Court Interpreter
Portuguese &
Spanish
Court Appointed tri-lingual
mediator
Member Medical
Interpreter Network
International
Arbitration, Trade Negotiation
MD Gyn Obs.
MBA
International Management
Atlanta, GA,
USA
|
Dr. Marcia Pinheiro
Lecturer at IICSE University
Certified Translator and Interpreter
Portuguese & English
NAATI
40296
Member: PROz, RGMIA, Ancient Philosophy
PhD in Philosophy and Mathematics
Master in Philosophy
Certified TESOL/TEFL professional
Licentiate in Mathematics
PO Box 12396 A’Beckett St
Melbourne, VIC, AU, 8006
Tel 0416915138
|
Master
Lankenau, tell us a bit about your experience with evaluation and accreditation
of interpreters, please.
Sure, Dr.
Pinheiro. First, we need to separate online from actual live courtroom scenario
evaluation: Online is limited primarily to the evaluation of recorded disc or
streamed tests. In the case of court interpreting, these cover examples of
sight, simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. Every online testing entity
has their own particular evaluation chart with all the specific things to be
listened for, and each of these has a weighted point system for deductions
based on specific and/or overall importance to the particular subject matter
being tested. Overall, it’s pretty cut and dry, giving the evaluator a fairly
accurate, albeit rather rudimentary, sense of a students’ interpreting
abilities/skill level.
Some of the main things one listens for
are:
· Knowledge of the language pair and its
nuances.
This
includes knowing the legal definitions as well as their lay language
equivalents.
· Fluidity and ease of expression while
interpreting.
In other
words, feeling comfortable or at home
when using the language pair.
· Comprehension and proper use of
terminology when interpreting.
· Accuracy and how well the language
register is maintained.
This
includes capacity to establish hierarchy of importance of the units of
reference, and also text analysis, such as being able to recognize sentences
and embedded ones within these.
· Measuring how well a student remembers
and how well it is recalled visually (sight translation) and orally
(simultaneous and consecutive), when interpreting in each modality.
A live
courtroom evaluation, whether in a mock trial setting or shadowing the
interpreter in an actual trial, would include all the previous evaluation
points mentioned plus the following;
· Alertness; effective listening and
observation.
· Amount of effort placed in pre-trial
preparation.
This includes familiarization with
charges and other pertinent facts in designated case prior to initiating
assignment.
· How well student conveys culture
without engaging in a cultural role.
This includes the ability to convey
total and complete impartiality at all times while
simultaneously interpreting gestures, facial expressions and voice
tonality of the witness.
A
contributing factor that’s often given a cursory glance or simply overlooked is
the case material that’s used in developing the various stages for testing of
the student. A good number of the online courses use actual cases. These are
redacted of the real names and addresses of all those involved and, with slight
modification, the remainder of the trial facts are left pretty much as is. Most
of these test cases are selected to offer a broad cross section of misdemeanor
and felony crime jury trial cases. Courses wishing to reflect a more
comprehensive selection will include bench trial traffic court, civil and
juvenile cases. These last two usually include divorce actions and truancy. For
the most part, online courses try to offer as wide and varied a spectrum of
examples of what interpreters may face in the course of their career as court
interpreters.
Medical
interpreting differs mainly in that the interpreter is considered an advocate
for the patient and not merely a transmitter of charges and responses as in a
trial situation. You could postulate that the relationship of interpreterpatientphysician
is symbiotic. The patients depend on the interpreter not only to inform the
physician regarding what ails them but also to be aware of important nuanced differences
in culture that may influence or affect treatment procedures. Besides the
necessity of being well grounded in the use and comprehension of medical
terminology, the medical interpreter needs to ascertain that the patient
completely understand whatever procedure is prescribed but also that the
physician be entirely aware of any apprehensions held by the patient and,
through the interpreter, put the patient at ease.
Master
Lankenau, I was thinking that this was going to be just one more blog post but
your contribution is looking more like something spectacular. This has made me
more aware of my inability to predict outcomes with regards to conversations
with other experts. Thanks
for the teachings received, but now I will have to try to concentrate on just
one of your points, since this is supposed to be a blog post, not a book, but
your knowledge and capacity of writing about things leads me to think that we
should be writing a book, not a blog post.
The point
I want to focus on is actually knowledge: Master Lankenau, I get, from your
writing, that knowledge of the type words and situations is very important in
your assessment.
I actually
think that the investments made in the profession and professionals of the
profession so far are close to laughable, so that I always think of relieving
them, and therefore also us two, from whatever could be seen as unnecessary.
One of the
ideas that occurred to me was that we could demand that every courtroom had an up-to-date
computer that the interpreter could be using, a computer containing at least three lexicons, two monolingual and one bilingual,
with expedite search and largest amount of entries allied to best quality as
possible.
I totally
think that we are not walking lexicons, and vocabulary might be a detail, not a
basic item. I definitely think that we should enjoy way more space than we do, and
it all starts with resources. In what comes to telephonic interpreting, for
instance, we cannot be obliged to have such a wonderful capacity in terms of
memory: It is either a job that obliges us to visit the upper levels of Bloom’s
Taxonomy when we make our basic decisions, and therefore a job that in much
resembles, in its most fundamental functions, an academic job, a job that is
made for the top intellectual, or a job where we go at most to the application
level of things when making basic decisions, so that we are trained to simply
repeat and perhaps locate things quickly in our memory records.
I think
one thing opposes the other in nature, so that we should definitely weaken the
requirement on knowledge of words and situations.
I was
recently queried by the government of Australia in terms of court interpreting,
and I did present the suggestion I here mention.
With telephonic
interpreting, I did not have the same luck, but I still presented my suggestion
on a blog post: That we have a special gadget, designed exclusively for our
profession, something like a set of headphones with buttons that say relay,
stop, and record, so that we wear these headphones when serving others. We
would then receive the message in the origin language through one ear, say
right, get it recorded by the headphones, and press the other button, relay,
after pressing stop by the end of the message.
In this
way, we will be hearing what they say in our ear, say left, as we relay the
message in the target language, what will have to mean more accuracy and also
more technical training.
One must
remember that we can always learn how to use a gadget well, but it is very hard
to imagine how we could fix memory problems, so that this has to be what is
rational for the profession.
Dr. Pinheiro, that’s a very commendable proposal
you made to your government and perhaps someday, in the not too distant future,
such a device as you describe may become a reality. However, even if an
apparatus of that nature were available today, it would necessarily be limited
for use by interpreters relaying what’s being spoken in the simultaneous rather
than the consecutive mode. We have a saying in Portuguese, A teoria na prática é outra, which basically means theory once put
into practice is something else. Due to the nature of a Q & A session
between a witness and the prosecution and/or defense attorney, having to take
time to press buttons on a headphone set would be both impractical and
distracting, not only to the interpreter using it but also to the jurors, judge
and attorneys awaiting the interpreted rendition of what is being said. Most of
the courtrooms I work in do supply headphones, particularly when there is more
than one non-English speaking person involved as a witness in the case and that
may have to testify at some time during the procedure. In these instances,
there are usually two interpreters; one to consecutively interpret the witness
on the stand and the other interpreting simultaneously into a mouth-covering
microphone transmitting to the headsets worn by the non-English speaking
witnesses. This is particularly useful during the often long opening and
closing arguments by both the prosecution and the defense. During the Q & A
of a witness, there is the occasional attorney with a penchant for long-winded
questions. This is an interpreter's nightmare in consecutive mode. This is
something most online court interpreter programs prepare their students for by
constantly emphasising the importance of good note taking. For the most part
though, in many instances the judge him or herself will curtail this by having
the attorney rephrase, allowing the interpreters more time to gather their
thoughts and check notes.
The fact of the matter is that most of the
MTs (mechanical translating) devices currently being tested, and
those available for limited applications, still have a very long way to go
before they will be accepted for use in a courtroom setting, where precision
and clarity of comprehension is of paramount importance. The MTs that are
available, albeit for limited use, are being experimented for use in large
conference settings, for simultaneous interpreting, and for a limited number of
languages, most notably Spanish and Chinese. Even in these instances the
subject matter may need to be pre-programmed into the device and the speaker
must keep to the original text. Any deviation or use of colloquialisms or
unfamiliar idiomatic expressions will throw the MT translation
off.
Master
Lankenau, your experience is extremely valuable, no doubts about it, but I was
actually referring to telephonic interpreting, and to the interpreter: We would
receive our calls, accept our jobs, and then press the buttons by the end of
the lines of the speaker, so that we could hear what they said again in one of
our ears and relay to the NES or to the English speaker. I am absolutely sure
that would raise our standards, not the opposite. At the moment, we are having
to make lots of notes, then read them as we relay to try to keep accuracy to
maximum. With this system, our notes would be a secondary source, and the
accuracy levels would be much higher. I take you are actually suggesting that
we have this system, of headphones, initially imagined as a tool for telephonic
interpreting, used also for onsite jobs. In fact, we could have a similar
system, not the same, for the interpreter to use when doing onsite jobs, so say
a device that they would carry, with a matching ear bud, a one-ear bud, with
the purpose of recording what is said by the source and having a second aid,
on top of the notes, coming through our ear after we press the relay button by
the time of relaying the message to the target. I do think this system may
serve us well also there, but the devices would be different, very different.
In both cases, who wears or carries the device is the interpreter, Master, not
anyone else. This is all to help the interpreter in terms of their basic
functions, not the others. As for MTs, I completely agree with you: They can’t,
and shouldn’t, be used in interpreting. I agree that interpreters and
translators are essential parts of the process of translation and
interpretation whilst human beings, that there is no possible replacement for
the human judgement that is necessary for the results of the work to match our
chosen standards. Our work is very much to the highest levels of the Bloom’s Taxonomy,
so that it is not really possible to sustain that a machine would someday be
the same as us, who would say better? Occasionally, with one paragraph or two,
informal communications, it is even possible to get a machine to replace us
with gain, but not in a long session or in a formal document. As you said, what
I have called localisms in my writing is indeed important, but there are also
aspects of human history (date of the document and place of origin matter quite
a lot even in terms of calligraphy), artistic writing, bad writing, cultural
addictions, and other factors that create the necessity of the existence of a
human being in this so impressive and fundamental connection between origin-language
and target-language discourse. I would like to beg you to read Translation
Techniques because there I talk about the Bloom’s Taxonomy being used as a tool
to measure quality and amount of work performed by us, translators and
interpreters.
Dr. Pinheiro, I am familiar with the paper you mention and would only add that with the assessment of interpreters, the skills that count the most are mental agility, linguistic flexibility, analytical skills and a heightened awareness of language usage and cultural differences. Since we seem to share similar interests in the study of the skills needed for achieving more effective and efficient translating and interpreting, perhaps in the near future we may cover the topic in more detail. It’s been a pleasure exchanging ideas with you.
Same from my end, Master Lankenau: A pleasure. My heart gets the impression that you should belong to the industry for even several lives because nothing is more important than love for what we do. From the bottom of my heart: Thank you.
References
Pinheiro,
M. R. (2015). Translation Techniques. Communication & Language at Work,
4(4).
Pinheiro,
M. R. (2016). Certificate in Translation. https://www.edcast.org/learn/certificate-in-translation-open
