The ATA Chronicle, March 1998

The editor of The ATA Chronicle is pleased to announce that with this special issue on interpreting, we are inaugurating a regular new column that will cover issues related to interpretation, entitled "Miss Interpreter Speaks," written by Laura Esther Wolfson.

Breeder Blanket Bingo: The Problem That Dare Not Speak Its Name

So there she is, Miss Interpreter, working at a bilateral, inter-agency meeting with the Ruritanians on some hot, post-Cold War issuebplutonium disposition, let's say, to pick at random one spellbinding topic from a list containing many others, all equally compelling. She is sailing along, reveling in her command of the jargon that typically flies back and forth at these meetings, effortlessly translating barbarisms like "deliverables," bwork order," "umbrella agreement," and "wordsmithing,b lobbing them first in one direction, then sending them zinging back in the other, like a tennis player alternately playing the net and the rear of the court. She hits the sweet spot every single time.

Suddenly gripped by inner voices prophesying doom, she glances down at the talking points just placed in front of her by a helpful aide and sees that five seconds away and bearing down on her like a smoke-belching locomotive approaching a shrieking young lovely tied to the tracks is a term that was not in the protocols of the previous meetings that she studied in preparation for this assignment. "Oxilate co-precipitation" she could deal with. "One-third MOX-fuel reactor core"bno problem. "International Atomic Energy Agency"bchild's play. But what is this? "Breeder blanket"?? Oh dear. What is an interpreter to do?

The speaker is a White House official. The meeting is high-level. ("High-level" is the term of choice among snootier interpreters to describe the events they grace with their presence, but in this case, it really is true.) The attendees are VIPS from the Ruritanian Ministry of Meltdowns and their counterparts from the U.S. Department of Enervation. The stakes are high. The chips are down. It isbBreeder Blanket Bingo!!

Miss Interpreter banishes from her imagination all of the highly improper thoughts evoked by the words "breeder" and "blanket" coupling in a single phrase, and concentrates on the difficult task ahead. If Miss Interpreter flubs "breeder blanket," she will edge out Monica Lewinsky on page one of The Washington Post tomorrow morning. Ah well, Miss Interpreter has made her bed and she is perfectly capable of lying in it, with the breeder blanket pulled up over her head, if need be.

Now the translators among you are thinking smugly, "This is exactly why I am a translator and not an interpreter." At the very first ATA conference Miss Interpreter ever attended, when she revealed under close and persistent questioning that she was (gasp!) an interpreter, she was immediately asked, "How do you guys always get it right the first time?" She replied that just as there are times when a translator does not get it right given all the time in the world (relatively speaking), so there are times when interpreters do not get it right the first time. (Actually, this question was preceded by another one: "What are YOU doing here?! This conference is for translators, not interpreters!" But she just looked through the questioner and feigned a temporary attack of deafness, a luxury an interpreter can permit herself only very rarely.)

As a seasoned interpreter once told her in a voice grown hoarse and gravelly from years of working at meetings where the fate of the world was forever in the process of being decided: "Honey, if you don't like making mistakes in front of large crowds of people, you're in the wrong business!" Which leads us to an overwhelming question, and the question most frequently faced by interpreters at cocktail parties: What do you do when you don't know a word? Nobody likes to admit that it happens; it is the problem that dare not speak its name: what to do when a thoroughly unfamiliar term comes crashing through that tiny pane of glass at the front of the simultaneous interpreting booth like a baseball through your elderly neighbor's dining room window? No amount of preparation can ensure that this will never happen. Every interpreter has faced it, and anyone who tells you she hasn't is either a shameless liar or completely inexperienced. Dealing with this situation is a matter of coping, linguistically and semantically, while (rule number one!) keeping a firm grip on your poise, your flawless grammar, and your trademark mien of cool unflappability.

Let us return now to Miss Interpreter, who is sweating bullets at the plutonium disposition meeting as she simultaneously contemplates changing careers and driving a school bus for a living. (This is why they are called simultaneous interpreters.) What is flashing through her head as the breeder blanket floats closer and closer, threatening to smother her in its fluffy and poisonous fibers?

Here is what she is thinking: "Hmmm...I can't come up with a credible Ruritanian equivalent for bbreeder.b It may be based on the Old Church Slavonic root meaning bto breed,b but that has a negative connotation and I need something in a more neutral register. Perhaps these engineers have simply borrowed the English word. On the other hand, if I use the equivalent word for bblanket,b my interpreter instincts, honed during years in the trenches, tell me that the utterance will be greeted with raucous laughter from the Ruritanian delegation."

A second glance at the invidious talking points reveals that the breeder blanket was procured from Company X in Vladivostock and installed at Reactor Q in November, 1997, pursuant to a report compiled by the bilateral working group (whose members are all present at the meeting, minus the chairman, who was forced to decline with regret in order to attend the regular meeting of the Consultants' Consortium Coordinating Committee held monthly in Barbados).

All of this goes through her head at lightning speed in a fraction of the time you have just taken to read the preceding two paragraphs.

Like a figure skater who feels that she is just not in the mood to do a triple axle on a particular day and cuts it from her routine at the last minute, Miss Interpreter makes an executive decision. (She is, after all, self-employed. Doesn't that make her an executive?) Since all those present were involved in or are at least familiar with the breeder blanket procurement deal, and there is enough information (date, place, etc.) about the transaction to provide all necessary cues and clues as to precisely what is being discussed, she opts for an elegantly simple and vague solution whose primary virtue is that it will not leave her lying in a bloody and tangled heap on the ground. She is about to translate bbreeder blanket" using the delightfully commodious and ambiguous Ruritanian word for "equipment," or "tool," when her partner, a staff interpreter at the Demihemigalaktinsk Nuclear Reactor, (nestled in the snowy tundras of Northwest Ruritania), a man with a thorough grasp of nuclear terminology dating back to the mid-thirteenth century, passes her a slip of paper containing the following words written out in block letters:

BLANKET BREEDER = VOSPROIZVODYASHCHIY EKRAN

literally, breproducing screen.b The phrase has been transliterated from Cyrillic here for those members of the ATA whose Ruritanian may be somewhat less than fluent.

Who would have thunk it? Miss Interpreter wonders as she stares down in mute gratitude at this missive from heaven. Despite the pressure, she pauses to note that her Ruritanian colleague favors Cyrillic script over the Roman, Grigorian, and Arabic alphabets that have come into more common use following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. This means one of two things: either he is an old-style communist and follower of Enver Hoxha, the late dictator of Albania, or else he belongs to a small sect of Christian believers dating back to the 17th century whose main creed is that all alphabets but the Cyrillic were devised by Western infidels intent on disseminating Glamour Magazine and the collected works of Dale Carnegie in Slavic-speaking countries.

The words "deus ex machina" do not begin to describe the relief provided by this tidy resolution, this collegial helping hand extended in a moment of urgent need. But, Gentle Linguist, it is a scene that occurs unremarked dozens of times each day in interpreting booths and meeting rooms the world over.

Miss Interpreter does not miss a beat. She inserts the phrase at the appropriate moment, completes her interpretation, pats her hairdo back into place, and daubs discreetly at the perspiration that has collected at her pulse points, using for the purpose a lace handkerchief she carries tucked into her left sleeve.

During the coffee break, a distinguished-looking, gray-at-the-temples Ruritanian academician, famed for his prodigiously high output of monographs on reactor physics, approaches and bows low before her, seizes her hand, plants his lips on it and then pumps it vigorously as he offers hearty congratulations on her grasp of the subject matter. "How long have you been specializing in breeder blanket procurement follow-up meetings?" he inquires in a pleasant baritone, speaking English with a slight Ruritanian accent. Miss Interpreter glances over at her American clients to see if they can hear the compliment. They are hunched over their notebook computers and communing with their cellular phones just a few feet away, oblivious to all that is going on around them.

"It is one of my more recent specialties," murmurs Miss Interpreter modestly in her lilting Ruritanian. Her eyes are demurely downcast. She clears her throat delicately and tucks a stray corner of her lace handkerchief back into her sleeve.

Ruritanian is clearly not her mother tongue, but it is so unusual for any foreigner to speak Ruritanian that her accent is, for all practical purposes, impossible to place. It has taken years of back-breaking study and grueling travel for her to reach the point where she can wield the language with relative ease. But it has been worth it, she now realizes. Every minute was worth it.

***

Gentle Linguist, we have come to the end of our story. Now is the time for closer examination. What would Miss Interpreter have done if her colleague had not saved the day? Depending on the situation in which she was interpreting, she had several options, all unsatisfactory, but all better than bursting into tears and bolting from the meeting room.

What is important to keep in mind is the following: all interpreted meetings fall somewhere on a continuum between those that are pro forma, protocol events and those at which actual work gets done and real information gets transmitted. If Miss Interpreter is in the simultaneous booth, the premium is on smooth delivery. In the booth, there are two categories of interpreters: the quick and the dead. All international meeting attendees who have racked up a respectable number of frequent flier miles know that in simultaneous interpretation a certain loss of meaning is acceptable, even expected. Contrary to Robert Frost's famous utterance, poetry is not the only thing that gets lost in translation.

That said, Miss Interpreter would like to state here her strong belief that a heavily armed guard should be placed at the entrance of every simultaneous interpreting booth to bar admittance to any interpreter who has not passed a rigorous oral exam in the terminology and subject of the field to be interpreted. She proposes this measure more out of concern for interpreters than for their audiences and feels that any interpreter who skips blithely into the booth without adequate preparation deserves the same stem scolding one gives a child who steps off the curb without first looking both ways. However, in this less-than-perfect world, where conference organizers often provide relevant printed materials to all parties involved except the interpreters (leading Miss Interpreter to wonder whether the omission is deliberate), competent interpreters do on occasion encounter unfamiliar terms while in the booth. The remarks in the preceding paragraph are addressed to them.

If, on the other hand, Miss Interpreter is in court, it is not only acceptable but incumbent upon her to request a pause in the proceedings so that she can leaf through her dictionaries and glossaries (at top speed, of course) until she finds the proper translation of "breeder blanket."

Most meetings fall somewhere between these two extremes. If, as was the case here, she was doing consecutive interpretation at a high-level meeting (there is that h-word again!), then her alternatives are several. If the term occurs in the middle or near the end of a long list of items, she may permit herself the liberty of omitting it. Or she might take aim at the troublesome term (this is known as trouble-shooting), selecting from her arsenal a loanword or semantic equivalent in the target language. The likelihood of hitting a bull's-eye using this technique goes up exponentially the longer she has been interpreting.

And there is another approach which she can use (again, in a consecutive interpretation setting only) if the meetings have been going on for at least half a day and she has established herself as a competent professional: apologizing profusely for the interruption while at the same time drawing absolutely no attention to herself, she can request clarification. The listeners will think, "Wow! This is the only word she doesn't know so far, and she is so confident and so bent on getting it right that she even stops the speaker to find out exactly what he means!" But she cannot make a regular practice of this, or she will lose all the credit she has racked up with the client.

Remember, if the meeting is purely protocol in nature, her job is to sound superb and give as much of the meaning as possible. If it is a working meeting, she must roll up her sleeves, get her hands dirty, and engage in a pitched battle to capture every ounce of meaning, keeping her chin up and grinning fiercely as she does so, like the semi-eponymous Evil Swan in Swan Lake who does 32 consecutive fouettC) turns en pointe without pausing for breath.

And count yourself lucky: if you are reading this article, that probably means that one of your working languages, blessedly, is English, the medium of international communication. There will no doubt be members of the foreign delegation in attendance who know all of the technical terms in English and the equivalents in their own language, even if they are incapable of conversing about the weather in English. Make friends with these people. Chat them up while the caterers are setting up the steam tables for lunch. Ask discreet questions. Take even more discreet notes. When you are interpreting, glance in their direction occasionally and see if they nod approvingly.

And remember, the people who organize international meetings are like mountaineers: they always use more than one set of ropes to tie themselves and everyone else in to the rock face. Documents have been translated, re-translated, back-translated, abstracted, and distributed. Everything has been discussed in detail in working groups before being referred to the plenary session where you are working. The higher-level the gathering, the more the subject has been vetted in advance. Everyone is already familiar with the subject and most of the decisions. That young aide with the classically Ruritanian reddish-blonde hair and hazel eyes and the prominent Mongolian cheekbones who is whispering into the deputy minister's ear as you work is providing annotation and comments to supplement your interpretation and prevent the deputy minister from saying something that could cause an international incident. (He is generally far worse-informed than his subordinates.) The higher-level the meeting, the less likely it is that someone will say something that has not been heard many times before. On both sides of the table there are likely to be several incognito bilinguals who do not reveal themselves unless the interpretation goes slightly awry, and they then get things back on track by making corrections in an undertone. They do it very discreetly, because if they are too conspicuous, someone may ask THEM to interpret next time. You must remember this: it is far, far easier to develop an enormous working vocabulary than it is to improvise because you don't know the generally accepted way to say something.

Nor is a large passive vocabulary a bad thing: often in the heat and pressure of the moment, items in your passive memory unexpectedly make the leap over to the active side, like civilian industrial plants converted to military use in time of war. Interpreting is based on preparation, previous knowledge, and the ability to bond these elements rapidly into a new and highly durable substance using the welding-torch of inspiration.

To quote that great twentieth-century mistress of fancy footwork and commanding stage presence, modern dance choreographer Martha Graham: "Behind one perfect free leap are hundreds of leaps taken over a period of years." The same holds true in our beloved and misunderstood profession.