The ATA Chronicle, February 2000.

On Meaning, Meaninglessness, and Emptiness

Occasionally, after a long day spent trudging back and forth across the language barrier tot­ing words loaded to a greater or lesser degree with semantic cargo, Miss Interpreter sets down her burden, straightens her back, and turns her mind, in a sort of post-exertion cooling-down exercise, to the issues of meaning and meaninglessness, their relation to speech, and the significance of all of this for the interpreter. 

Miss Interpreter does this, she repeats, only occasionally, because long ago she learned that, paradoxical as it may sound, it does not do for the interpreter to engage with meaning and its opposite too inti­mately or too frequently, or to get too close to the white-hot smithy where mes­sages are actually forged. That is outside her bailiwick.

The relationship between the inter­preter and the wares she purveys, i.e., meaning, talk, and language, should be characterized by caution and distance, like the relationship between the assem­bly line worker at an ice cream factory and the mocha chip crunch, rocky road, and raspberry swirl that pass in front of her in numbing quantities hour after hour. For both the interpreter and the ice cream packer, the opportunity to overindulge is omnipresent, but after a few weeks on the job, each one of them learns that while gorging may even be allowed by the man­agement and may carry with it fleeting, superficial rewards, it is not in her interest to make liberal use of this freedom over the long haul. To maintain herself in the top form required to do the job well, restraint and circumspection—which involve a certain degree of dis­tance from the commodities she deals with every day—are in order. She samples her goods sparingly, sucking from the pointed tip of a silver dessert spoon in miniscule portions designed to keep the palate clear and minimize the subsequent digestive burden, tasting only as necessary to verify that the formula is correct and is being faithfully adhered to. She remains aloof.

There is a principle in interpreting that has never, as far as Miss Interpreter knows, been described, only experienced inchoately by many inter­preters, a principle analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics. It goes something like this: if an interpreter gets too close to the meaning or meaninglessness of what she is interpret­ing, she has a distorting impact on the message, as it does, in turn, on her. She needs to stand back in order to see the whole thing clear­ly. The greater her vocabulary, and the more interjections, exclamations, subjects, suffixes, prefixes, predicates, particles, and other articles in her arsenal, the more likely she will be able to hit her target squarely on the bulls-eye while standing at a safe distance. Put another way, a large vocabulary equipped with rapid search capacity (the ability to fit the right word to a concept even if she cannot, in the moment, be precisely sure of the concept’s implications) is a sturdy footbridge allowing her to pass safely and speedily over seemingly boundless swamplands of abstraction. What do community organiz­ers do? What is consensus-building? Opinion-leader buy-in? Empowerment? Don’t even try to unpack them while you are in the interpreting booth, it’s too crowd­ed in there as it is—just know how to trans­late them. And keep moving.

Early in her career, a typical inter­preter may view her function as that of an impersonator who appears to generate or regenerate the meaning issuing from the original speaker, complete with gesticulations, eye-rolling, and expressions of ecstasy and dismay. She may even be convinced that she is experiencing the meaning as it goes through her. She feels possessed; she feels on the verge of falling writhing upon the floor; she feels capable of handling poisonous snakes, of speaking in tongues in all senses of that phrase. Such delusions are clear indica­tion that she is too close to the source of the message. Exorcism is called for. She cannot pace herself properly, and she, her professional performance, and the mes­sage all suffer as a result. It is impossible to be so theatrical without obscuring the message or adding to it, and in the end, an end that in cases like this generally comes rather quickly, such performances lead to nausea, giddiness, migraines, and hysteria, with nervous collapse following close behind. (Reader, Miss Interpreter knows this to be true; she remembers.)

And then comes a crucial moment in the life of the interpreter, when she real­izes that she is supposed to function not as an impersonator, but rather as a pane of glass, clear, transparent, not re-constituting the message, but simply allowing its outlines and then its entire shape to become visi­ble through her.

With that realization, everything changes fundamentally, including the interpreter’s relation to the message. The interpreter-as-impersonator tries to plumb the meaning of every utterance she interprets and act it out, at times broadly, as we have seen. The transpar­ent interpreter understands that not every utterance makes sense, nor is it intended to. Some painstakingly assem­bled and beribboned packages of words, are, when unwrapped, revealed as empty of meaning, and in such cases it is nonethe­less the interpreter’s task to convey the package as if it does have a semantic load, similar to the way a mime sags and staggers under the weight of an imagi­nary or invisible box. The transparent interpreter knows that statements have many purposes besides conveying mean­ing: they may be meant to draw speaker and listener closer together, drive a wedge between them, pass the time, fill a silence, evoke laughter, build a reputa­tion, create an atmosphere, or fulfill an obligation.

There are even statements that the transparent interpreter herself cannot fully grasp, but that she can nonethe­less transmit so that the listener does understand, causing listener and speaker to lock eyes over the interpreter’s head in perfect comprehension—the interpreter as monkey-in-the-middle. Ditto another situation that occurs with mystifying frequency—contrary to popular belief, more often than its opposite—in which an unfunny joke, seemingly devoid of any punch line, is interpreted, sending the listener off into gales of merriment. The interpreter, meanwhile, furrows her brow and replays the joke silently in both languages in a vain attempt to figure out where the humor was and how she managed to convey it.

After a day of interpreting, the inter­preter-as-impersonator falls into bed exhausted, having lived every emotion expressed by her principals, unable to change channels, groping in vain for a nonexistent off switch on the side of her head, muttering to herself and endlessly replaying memorable exchanges like some obsessive-compulsive bilingual lunatic. Meanwhile, the transparent interpreter takes herself off to a little hideaway with a good band, sips champagne, dances the tango, and thinks not at all about the words that have passed through her that day. She is a window; all she needs is the metaphysical equivalent of a few swipes with a Windex-dampened rag to keep her clear. The transparent interpreter and the interpreter-as-impersonator perform the same acts, but the former does them more efficiently, burns fewer calories and sweats less. The interpreter-as-imperson­ator is a wild-haired Romantic, banging away at the keyboard; the transparent interpreter eschews rubato. The inter­preter-as-impersonator follows her pas­sion; the transparent interpreter is the soul of fidelity. The interpreter-as-imper­sonator believes herself the center of attention, she mounts a one-woman vaudeville show; the transparent inter­preter is a ghostly, indiscernible presence, and that is how she likes it. She even gets a bit disconcerted when well-meaning, respectful clients ask her to introduce herself to the meeting partici­pants as a job gets under way, for this blows her cover, drags her temporarily into the visible range of the spectrum, renders her earthly, corporeal.

Often, this shift from interpreter-as-­impersonator to transparent interpreter is triggered when the interpreter is working for two parties who are at loggerheads due to differing goals or cultural misunderstandings. As a result, the interpreter finds herself directly in the line of fire, with expressions of blame and anger (usually politely veiled, but not always) whistling by at dangerously close range, or even penetrating her and then whizzing out the other side. The whine of these verbal bullets is, of course, distract­ing; the entry and exit wounds keep her from functioning at the top of her form. This is particularly true if she herself finds fault with the way the side that is paying her is treating the other side, making her feel guilty and responsible for missteps that are not her doing.

In this situation, in the natural process of self-preservation, the interpreter may take a figurative step to one side, distance herself emotionally from the remarks fly­ing at her from both directions, breathe evenly, drop her gaze, and render the messages with the utmost simplicity of manner and without any air of ownership (for she no more owns the utterances she delivers than the postman owns the mail). After all, raised voices, upset expres­sions, and gesticulations will make it across the language barrier just fine with­out an extra push from her. If she takes all of these actions in the sequence given, she will find that she sustains far fewer injuries and does her job far better.

This is what Miss Interpreter means when she speaks of not engaging too often or too closely with meaning.

For interpreting is the ultimate act of giving, of relinquishing meaning, of for­getting. As soon as the interpreter receives something, she passes it on, retaining little or nothing for herself. The more quickly and completely she offers up the burden, the better. She must empty herself of every thought and emotion that may interfere with her work, both those whose residence within her pre­dates the given interpreting job, and those that are residue from the present job, building up inside her as she works.

Interpreting is an activity that toler­ates no impurities, no superfluous thoughts or feelings. If there is so much as a trace of yolk in the initial mixture, it will not beat up white and fluffy. On the other hand, if done properly, it leaves no waste products behind; when the action is complete everything should be fully con­sumed, burned off in a sheet of lavender flame, like rum from a skillet of bananas flambé.

Each chunk of information is received, stored in short-term memory—which is just another way of saying long-term oblivion—passed on, and dumped. Ideally, interpreting is an egoless activity; the interpreter is one member in a bucket brigade, passing water from the well (the source) to the person waiting to drink. That is why the seasoned inter­preter, the transparent one, can drop off to sleep after a day’s work without reliving everything she has witnessed. It is all gone. The jottings on her steno pad, deci­phered in tranquility, no longer make sense—their animating moment has passed. They are as useless as last year’s butterflies. This is why our profession does not have the status we would like it to have—because interpreters are con­stantly engaged in divestiture, emptying and giving rather than accumulation, actions at odds with everything the world teaches us about the importance of get­ting and keeping.

Interpreting is about learning quickly and forgetting even faster in order to clear space for the next item, soon to be oblit­erated in its turn. In the end, interpreting is about un-knowing, about receptivity succeeded by emptiness, with only an ephemeral intervening moment of full­ness. The interpreter constructs a pas­sageway inside herself that is open at both ends, like the culvert through which a river flows until it finds—resumes—its proper channel. Through this culvert, its inside walls polished smooth by communication’s ceaseless flowing, information and words tum­ble in an infinite arc, constantly spilling out at the far end.

What does this mean for the inter­preter, caught in an endless cycle of filling and emptying? It means that the longer she works, the more evidence she accrues in support of the notion that we live in a world where lofty words far outnumber lofty deeds and empty words far outweigh meaningful ones, a world where the amount of meaning and the number of words in a peroration often stand in inverse proportion to each other. It means that the longer she works, the more likely it is that she will hear primarily combinations of words she has heard many, many times before. And Miss Interpreter must work her alchemical transformations on all of these agglomerations of verbiage, regardless. She knows as no one else does the truth of Nietzsche’s remark that language is a heap of dead metaphors. It is all so familiar that meaning is nearly irrele­vant—not infrequently, all she needs to do is scan her toolkit for the appropriate template—a concept conveyed in some lan­guages by the word “cliché.” Her profession forces these dispiriting facts on her attention to a degree verging at times on the stupefying.

Oh, it is sad, this work of ours whose only constant is evanescence, this work in which an excess of meaning, often obscure, often elusive, achieving a certain critical mass, is qualitative­ly transformed into overwhelming meaninglessness. And the interpreter is always the midwife, always the midwife. But is there any worthwhile profession that delivers unmitigated happiness? Miss Interpreter thinks not.

The hour is late and these thoughts are getting to be more than she can bear. Enough. Early on in this disquisition she said that only rarely does she permit herself such flights of fancy, and here, if nowhere else, meaning and words coincide. She stoops, hoists her burden onto her shoulder once more, and trudges onward, towards the language barrier glimmering on the horizon. In the middle distance, she sees the lights of a village reflected off the low-lying nocturnal clouds. Perhaps someone there will give her a place to lay her head for the night. Tomorrow she will continue on her way.