The ATA Chronicle, September 2000

How to Get Better Reception: from Hors d’oeuvres to Chef d’oeuvres

How the interpreting clan has grown, Miss Interpreter got to thinking lately as she looked through a family photo album. Where once the haughty dowager, conference interpreting, stood in solitary splendor, late in life she has remade herself into a matriarch, spawning numerous offspring in a show of fertility positively astonishing for one her age.

There is the pretentiously named seminar interpreting, an artificial creation of the government large-volume procurement process. She does the same simultaneous work as the conference interpreter, but she does it many more days per year, for lower pay, in worse conditions, recovering on the heavy workload what she loses in pay cuts. She uses flimsy, government-issue, portable interpreting equipment, usually carried in a shapeless canvas bag spotted with grease (also government-issue). This equipment is a tangle of wires, microphones, and earpieces resembling nothing so much as a marine invertebrate that has swum far upstream through inland waterways and somehow washed up on a conference room tabletop. The equipment malfunctions frequently, and the seminar interpreter must cope with its vagaries on her own without help from a sound technician, the same sound technician whom the conference interpreter in the booth regards as her birthright. On the other hand, given the current state of the interpreting market and working conditions, Miss Interpreter supposes that seminar interpreters should be grateful that this piece of technology, which so closely resembles an octopus in almost every way, stops short of spurting an inky, malodorous cloud of liquid in her direction while she is working.

Then there is consecutive interpreting. She stands up straight and attentive at the podium with a steno pad in her hand and a pen at the ready, forever waiting for the garrulous presenter to arrive at the end of his utterance so that she can get to the beginning of hers before her memory starts dribbling from its underside like a leaky bucket patched with globs of mud.

There are also those promising and energetic young folk, medical, court, and community interpreting, toiling to make the world of interpreting safe for democracy and bringing linguistic rights to all those who lack them. And there are other members of the family, too, less frequently seen, such as telephone interpreting, who stays at home out of sight (she prefers lounging on the sofa in her dressing gown), but works no less competently than her colleagues who make themselves presentable and go forth into the world each day.

And there is another interpreter, the cocktail party or reception interpreter, whose work also goes under-remarked, and who is also deserving of note.

"Cocktail parties?" you are thinking. What have interpreters to do with cocktail parties? But wait. Have you ever heard of a conference that did not start and finish with a cocktail party? Would you agree to attend a conference from which these crucial rituals of opening and closure were missing? Some longer conferences are even punctuated with several receptions in addition to the opening and closing ones, to make sure the participants do not suffer pangs of thirst or become engrossed in the conference topic to an unhealthy degree.

Sometimes the conference interpreters are charged with handling these after-hours events, sometimes additional escort or consecutive interpreters are hired to work them, but either way, interpreting at a cocktail party is fraught with unusual moments and calls for skills virtually unknown and rarely discussed in interpreting circles. Miss Interpreter says "rarely," and not "never," because she has heard of one highly reputable interpreting school where the students do learn a few valuable things about working at receptions, to wit: that at all such evening events, the interpreter should be slightly less dressed up than the other people there—leave your sequined taffeta ball gown at home, please—as opposed to daytime business meetings, where the interpreter should be the best dressed person present—wearing a suit, even if no one else is. And the other lesson about receptions that these unusually well-prepared students receive comes when the instructor brings copious quantities of liquor to class and everyone is invited to imbibe. Then they interpret. What do the students learn, having bungled their interpretation more than usual? That drinking and interpreting do not mix. That the open bars at receptions and banquets are closed to interpreters.

But there is much more to know about interpreting at receptions than what and what not to put on yourself and in yourself. The problematics of multilingual cocktail party venue discourse and their impact on the work of the interpreter deserve more attention than they have heretofore received. Some cocktail parties are tedious, pro forma affairs where the suits seem to be wearing the people rather than vice versa, events from which the guests sneak away at the earliest opportunity. Other cocktail parties are characterized by wild abandon, lasting long beyond their scheduled ending time. At these more unbridled get-togethers, grapes, caviar, and jumbo shrimps squelch underfoot, delegates skid merrily through puddles of champagne, pronounce extravagant toasts in loud voices to no one in particular, and waltz with waiters bearing precariously stacked trays toward the kitchen. But no matter how varied cocktail parties are one from another, there are certain rules that generally obtain.

Even the dullest cocktail parties are different from every other sort of interpreted meeting in that they are, by their nature, thoroughly lacking in any kind of structure: conversational groups form and disperse unpredictably, unrestricted by agenda, schedule, formal presentations, or even seating plan. As a result, the cocktail party presents one of the greatest challenges to both the interpreter and the interpretee: identifying and finding each other so as to get down to the pressing task of removing the language barrier. In all other meetings, the speaker knows from the beginning who the interpreter is, because she is either in a booth or at his elbow. The cocktail party challenge is two-pronged. First, in a crowd of people milling around in business suits and holding glasses, how is the prospective user of interpreting services to determine which of the people who look exactly like everyone else are in fact interpreters in disguise? Second, how is the interpreter to make herself known to those who need her, without making a pest of herself with those who do not? This is especially tricky at an opening reception where no one has yet been introduced or seen the interpreters functioning in a more official capacity.

Some perspicacious conference organizers provide lapel pins or tags bearing the word “Interpreter” and the intended wearer’s name. Miss Interpreter welcomes this method of dispelling confusion about who is who, but notes with consternation that some of her collars have taken on the appearance of well-used dart boards as a result of this method. She has also noticed that many interpreters are less than willing to wear these tags (which often have a blue ribbon attached at the bottom), feeling, perhaps, that they are more appropriate for pigs at a county fair. Perhaps they feel that identifying themselves removes the challenge for the delegate in search of an interpreter, insults the delegate's intelligence, or unfairly renders the interpreter an easy target.

Once Miss Interpreter was at a conference reception where, in an innovative move by the organizers, 16 interpreters were asked to stand under a large sign bearing the word "Interpreters" in many different languages. Perhaps this did make things too easy, for during the entire course of the reception not a single interpreter was approached and asked to help. Mysteriously, the delegates were seen chatting animatedly with people with whom they were known to have no common language, and they conducted all of their business that evening without the aid of interpreters, although all the delegates were monolingual and represented a wide range of unrelated languages of lesser diffusion. (This strange event, incidentally, coincided with a full moon.)

Maybe some conference attendees eschew simple methods of finding an interpreter because they find the blind date approach appealing. The blind date approach involves going up to a stranger in a large public space, fixing that person with a piercing look, making hesitant introductions, and then scurrying away in embarrassment upon realizing that the person found was not the person sought. Perhaps conference attendees prefer the thrill of the hunt. Whatever the reason, many conference organizers continue to overlook the issue of nametags and recognition at cocktail parties, leaving interpreters to haunt the margins of these events unidentified and underutilized.

For the interpreter, the problem presented by the cocktail party has another aspect as well, hinted at earlier. The interpreter has been hired and brought in by the client to aid communication, but how to know if the participants want their communication aided? The seasoned interpreter is familiar with situations where the participants would rather not communicate, thank you very much, situations in which communication simply confuses matters further.

Walking up to delegates and saying, "Hello, my name is X and I will be your Ruritanian interpreter for the evening," while holding your notepad as if preparing to take down a drink order, is often not the best approach. This method has the drawback of forcing the delegate to tell you bluntly that he does not want your services, even when there is a forlorn-looking speaker of the other language standing just a few steps away.

What the practiced interpreter does in such a situation is this: she surveys the field before her and in her mind she divides everyone she sees into groups by nationality, determining which of them speak her A language and which speak her B language. Even if she is too far away to hear what language they are speaking, she can draw conclusions based on the cut of their suits, the make of their shoes, and other indescribable but unmistakable differences in bearing, build, and feature that set representatives of one nationality apart from those of another. Then she stands off to the side unnoticed and she waits. Should speakers of different languages seem to gravitate toward each other, exchange glances and shuffle their feet, playing peek-a-boo across the language barrier, she bears down on them silently and very fast, gliding to a halt a few yards away with a raised eyebrow and an alert expression.

The distance that she maintains between the delegates and herself allows them to pretend, should they so choose, that they have not seen her, while the alert look sends the opposite message: she is at their service if they need her. It is a complex triangular approach-avoidance dance, but if she does not perform the steps prescribed, she runs the risk of missing her cue, of not being where she is needed when she is needed. That is a faux pas no interpreter can afford to commit with any regularity.

What happens to the interpreter during that interval, sometimes a rather long one, before the conference attendees need her, recognize her, reel her in, and put her to work? Several things can happen. The wise interpreter takes this time to seize a plate and heap it with cheese cubes, chunks of cauliflower, and thick white dip flecked with mysterious bits of something dry and green and ingest the whole combination while she can; this may be the only dinner she gets. (In addition, Miss Interpreter has noticed that clients like to see interpreters at receptions holding plates of food; it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling and makes them feel that they are taking good care of the help.) She politely steers clear of conference attendees who try to engage her in chitchat, for this can only end in disappointment, discomfort, and disillusionment for both parties. Interpreters need to concentrate and ready themselves as they survey the room and wait to make their entrance; speaking with anyone other than a close colleague breaks their concentration and makes them anxious. Conference attendees, for their part, often cannot hide their letdown when they learn the person they are talking to is not a colleague in their field but a mere service provider. It is even more uncomfortable if the actual paying client sees the interpreter chatting and not working. How to signal to the client glaring balefully at you from across the room that you were waiting to be needed, that you do not want to force yourself on anyone, and that while you were waiting for someone to need you, you became the object of undesired attention? Interpreters, if you are hired to work at a reception and you discover at any given moment that you are engaged in some activity other than interpreting, or that you are not engaged in any activity at all, don your invisible look and swathe yourself in a mantle of solitude.

But now that uncomfortable interval is over, and the interpreter has, like a whale in polar waters, permitted herself to be caught. Like a whale in polar waters? There are indigenous peoples in the Far North who believe that the whale is a creature from a higher, more spiritual plane who gives itself up to the hunter with his harpoon, allows itself to be seduced, so to speak, in order to benefit the natural order of things, so that its bones, skin, and flesh may go to house, clothe, and feed the one who takes its life. So, too, the interpreter at a cocktail party. In a conscious act of surrender and self-sacrifice, she makes herself available to those who need her, immolates herself on the pyre of apparently trivial chatter, for the greater good of all.

What happens next? The level of discourse at conference receptions is highly varied compared to what is said in speeches, panel discussions, and question-and-answer sessions before large audiences. Because cocktail party exchanges are spontaneous and intimate, with often as few as three witnesses or participants (counting the interpreter, who does not count, so that makes two), they tend either toward the singularly vacuous or the singularly significant; the latter to include off-the-record exploratory discussions, negotiating breakthroughs, and searing personal revelations. The interpreter must be prepared for all extremes, for in small groups, the constraining element of shame does not make itself felt. Hence, a heightening of both honesty and idiocy.

It is disappointing but not surprising that the most frequently encountered type of cocktail party exchange is vacuous rather than significant. The interpreter may feel that she is not performing a valuable social function by interpreting empty exchanges that seem hardly worth the energy required to repeat, let alone render in another language, and that her work may even cause harm or result in some sort of negative balance of value in the universe relative to the effort expended. (This is wrong, an urban myth as misguided as the notion that celery sticks take more calories to digest than they contain, resulting in greater weight loss the more of them you eat. Has anyone ever slimmed down by consuming a bathtubful of celery? Of course not.) Talking across cultures is almost always good, even when the exchanges have a negative content balance. At the very least, the listener learns that his interlocutor is someone to be avoided in future. This, too, is knowledge worth having.

An important note: The free-flowing nature of the cocktail party invests the interpreter with unusual powers; if the interpreter makes herself conspicuous, shifts her weight from one foot to the other, sighs heavily, looks weary, it is within her power to bring a conversation to a speedy conclusion. But she should never abuse this power for her own purposes. She should use this method only when she sees that one party to the conversation has been trapped and is too polite or too helpless to get away without her subtle assistance.

There is much more Miss Interpreter could say about working at receptions, but only one other point that is truly important. A reception can be so valuable that it may sometimes even serve as a talisman to hold at bay the two things interpreters fear most of all: insufficient preparation materials and faulty interpreting equipment. At a reception years ago, Miss Interpreter was doing her stuff during an impassioned soliloquy about the proper way to store plutonium by means of vitrification (encasing the offending substance in glass). The subject was being expounded upon by a nervous little Ruritanian man who rapidly stuffed olives into his mouth one after the other as, over the course of 45 minutes, he explained vitrification to an American colleague. Throughout this disquisition, the American stared unwaveringly down into his cocktail. At one point, Miss Interpreter was about to start looking weary and shifting her weight from one foot to the other. (For the American's sake, not her own. The whole subject was new to her, and she found it quite fascinating, and during those three-quarters of an hour she went from ignoramus to expert regarding plutonium vitrification. It was the American who was getting glassy-eyed, not Miss Interpreter.) For some reason she thought better of it and stuck it out, even asking for clarification a few times, which the informality of a cocktail party allows an interpreter to do. The little man joyfully obliged, heaping clarification upon clarification.

The following afternoon, she was in the booth when the self-same little man rose from his seat and began a discourse on plutonium vitrification very similar to what he had been saying the night before. And as he was explaining the virtues of the process, her earphones began to crackle loudly; his very words seemed to be reaching her encased in thick glass, as if to prove his point that anything surrounded by glass will be irretrievably cut off from its surroundings. His mouth moved, but only one in three words reached her. The static grew louder, the man's voice fainter. Sheer panic very nearly ensued. Then, images from the previous evening's conversation starting coming to her: the rapidly disappearing olives, the American gripping his cocktail. The sound track from yesterday's reception kicked in inside her head. She started recalling all she had learned about vitrification. The equipment in the booth continued to malfunction, but now she was able to fill in from memory what she couldn't hear.

Readers, the previous evening's good reception had compensated for bad reception in the booth. Need Miss Interpreter say more?