Laura Esther Wolfson. Articles on Interpretation (1998 - 2004)

SlavFile, Winter 2004

The Interpreter Interpreted/Psychoanalyzed: Why Interpreting May Make You Crazy and What To Do About It

Notes for a talk given at the Conference of the American Translators Association in Phoenix, Arizona, 2003

Editors note: we are publishing the complete text of this talk presented at the last ATA conference under the aegis of the Interpreters Division, since it was scheduled opposite the SLD’s Greiss lecture, preventing some of our members, who ordinarily would have flocked to it, from attending. A previous version of this talk was delivered to the New York Circle of Translators and its text published in their newsletter.

I must tell you up front that I have nothing of pragmatic value to say today.

I will not be talking about

And I will definitely not be talking about what reference works and translation tools you absolutely must have in order to be a sophisticated, cutting-edge, high-precision, technologically with-it, international, localized, globalized, multilingual, native-speaking quality-controlled language services specialist.

(Sorry, I have been looking at too many translation company websites lately.)

No, my presentation this evening will be a bit like one of those animated documentaries on public television in which the viewer seems to be floating in a little boat upstream through someone’s veins and arteries and learning about the functioning of various internal organs.

But, you will be glad to hear, minus the visual aids. 

Tonight we are going to peer into the mind and soul of the interpreter, and see how it is affected by the activity of interpreting. 

It won’t be pretty.

In fact, the first part may seem a bit grim, but if you just hang in there, your persistence and loyalty will be rewarded with the requisite happy ending.

1.  Depression

Interpreting can induce depression in its practitioners. 

Why?

One model of what the interpreter does is to create a sort of culvert in her mind, through which words and ideas pass unimpeded, like industrial run-off, from one side of the language barrier to the other.

The interpreter’s mind and lips thus serve as temporary dwelling place to a stream of ideas and utterances that are not infrequently alien to her, and that never hang around for long.  The interpreter’s mind becomes a sort of intellectual boarding house or bus station. The traces of these utterances mingle in all sorts of strange ways and ultimately disappear. 

Interpreters have highly developed short-term memory, but short-term memory is just another name for long-term oblivion. 

Thus, a sense of alienation and transience are the interpreter’s constant companions.

Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental writer raised in a trilingual diplomatic family in Geneva, was interviewed concerning her post-modernist novel Between, about a simultaneous interpreter. She said:

“...it’s all the language, the lunatic empty speech-making of all the different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on and of course, the actual languages, all jostled together…”

So, the interpreter’s primary challenges as a human being include

1)      maintaining a sense of identity and

2)      not giving in to the cynical attitude (even if supported by her reality) that all is fleeting, and that many statements are not backed up with actions. 

Among the types of utterances the interpreter is regularly called upon to transmit are promises and commitments. Frequently the two parties to the discussion are economically or politically unequal and the more powerful partner is promising some sort of aid.  Subsequent meetings between the parties, where the promises are delivered upon, or not, may be serviced by other interpreters. When you interpret promises over and over and are not present to see them made good upon, it is easy to assume that most promises are broken. And perhaps that is true, but you should not assume so unless you are sure.

2.  Alienation

The interpreter may experience a sense of separateness from those with whom she works, in part because she is in a different field from the people for whom she interprets, who may be scientists or diplomats, and also because she does not belong completely to either side of the language barrier (and is thus mistrusted by both sides).

Furthermore, it is common for interpreters to peg their own worth to the rank of the people they work for or to how much they travel for their work, instead of using as a measure something that is more intrinsic. This may cause alienation from self.

It is common for interpreters to be caught in webs of cultural misunderstanding, with each side looking to them expectantly to justify its own position and explain that of the other side—another source of alienation.

3.  Stress

Interpreting triggers stress in all sorts of ways unimaginable to people who have never been in the interpreter’s seat (booth).

There is the risk of making a crucial error, obviously, but also the possibility of:

  1. being corrected for a mistake you haven’t made by someone less knowledgeable about the language—this could be a matter of a mere false cognate—and then the interpreter is torn between defending her rendition versus letting it pass, especially if the person doing the correcting is of high rank;
  2. interpreting while being interrupted;
  3. concentrating during cross-talk;
  4. hearing an utterance you cannot understand, (and it happens to everyone)—sometimes this even happens in your native language;
  5. interpreting before a polyglot audience in the knowledge that your every word is being second-guessed by numerous listeners;
  6. interpreting for speakers who are culturally insensitive or insult their audience (especially stressful if the speaker and the interpreter share a native language, making the interpreter feel somehow more responsible for the speaker’s offensive statements);
  7. interpreting for speakers who say things like:  “I have three things to say, they are both very important, and it is…” 

In other words, interpreting assignments can be marked by arid, painful stretches that sometimes last for hours, or perhaps they merely seem to, when interpreting resembles a form of utterly gratuitous torment. At these times, the act of interpreting feels like a blade slicing deeply into the spongy but resistant matter of the brain, the interpreter’s brain is like a machine whose functioning has gone terribly awry with no one nearby to fix it or throw the ‘off’ switch, with cogs grinding, grinding against each other until the friction is almost unbearable; gaskets blowing; blackened bits of springs popping out and clattering on the floor; and a sulphurous burning smell filling the air. 

It goes without saying that in no way does the quality of the interpreter’s work suffer during these hellish periods and that she gives no outward sign of what is happening; the listeners are as oblivious to the interpreter’s agonies as the ancient Romans were when, as was their wont, they would celebrate military victories by dining at groaning boards placed, along with the benches on which the celebrants sat, on the bodies of prisoners of war who were, as the evening’s festivities unfolded, slowly crushed to death under the dreadful weight of feast, feasters and furniture.  It was not only the board that groaned. The victors ignored their victims’ screams, or did not notice them.  The interpreter cannot scream.

Yes, sometimes interpreting reaches such a pitch of difficulty that the interpreter, without noticing how or when, starts to look upon the speaker as a highly specialized kind of torturer, forgetting that he is devising opaque circumlocutions at top speed for reasons entirely unrelated to increasing the interpreter’s suffering.

So, what is the answer?  Hint: it is not talk therapy and it is not pharmaceuticals.  In fact, it does not cost any money.

1.  Maintain your mind richly stocked with knowledge, thoughts and varied registers of language:  current events, great literature, slang and stirring oratory. Have plenty of human contact, as well. Then the act of interpreting will not leave you feeling depleted and worthless.

2.  Have an expansive professional network, where the line between a colleague and a friend is a blurry one.

3. Never lose sight of these important Interpreting Life Lessons:

  1. Interpreters have contact with people all up and down the social ladder: treat them all with the same simplicity and respect. VIPs, weary of sycophants, will value your simplicity. The humble, accustomed to being patronized or ignored, will value your respect;
  2. Interpret the feeling, not just the words;
  3. Do not castigate yourself if you do not always know which fork to use; diplomats and heads of state sometimes get this wrong too.

4.  Ask the client for the working conditions you need:

  1. Reasonable hours;
  2. An interpreting partner to share the workload;
  3. Preparation materials;
  4. Decent acoustics;
  5. Speech that is not unreasonably fast;
  6. Acceptable pay.

In requesting and receiving the conditions needed to do a good job, the interpreter ceases to be the suffering creature described above, laboring in silence and pain, instead experiencing the work as sheer pleasure, that state psychologists call “flow.” At these times, the interpreter is completely focused on her task, at one with it.

 As the poet William Butler Yeats wrote, “Who can tell the dancer from the dance?”

During periods of flow, the interpreter is oblivious to time’s passage. She is startled when she feels that tap on her shoulder or other non-verbal sign from her partner indicating that thirty minutes have elapsed and it is again time to relinquish the microphone and take a break. She is thinking, where did the time go?  Who needs relief when work is going this well? 

Like the dolphins at Sea World, les mots justes rise up over and over and break through the surface of the unconscious mind, curve in a graceful arc, in proper sequence, at just the necessary speed, through whatever invisible medium it is (does it have a name?) that intervenes between unconscious mind and speech organs. In a word, all is going swimmingly.  

Conclusion:  despite the difficulties of interpretation, the pleasures of the occupation outweigh the pain.