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Top > Profession > A Chief Interpreter's view |
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Sergio Viaggio(AIIC) Summary of the keynote presentation delivered at the XIV FIT Congress, Melbourne, 12 - 16 February 1996. Introduction Ours is a young and mostly unexplored profession. True, in 50 years, we have gone a long way towards accomplishing what took medicine, for instance, some 25 centuries to achieve: turning into a recognized profession based on a recognized discipline taught at recognized academic institutions. Also, if until fairly recently you just bumped into the profession, now - provided you know internationally weighty languages - as every other regular professional, you choose it, while, through an ever-increasing number of ever more proficient schools and the sheer existence of AIIC, it also chooses you. But only in Europe and North America, and then only for the more international languages. For my part, I shall speak as a professional interpreter now in charge of administering an interpretation section at the United Nations. The recruiter Most people who listen to and administrative interpreters are notoriously ignorant of what it takes to be one. It is not their fault: we have no-one to blame but ourselves, since, in order to educate the user, what is needed is a coherent, systematic and faithful verbalization of experience, an explanation of practice, or as Marx put it when defining science, experience made awareness, i.e. theory. Only interpreters can understand what it really takes to be one - and since not that many can also convincingly explain it to the layman in the Administration, that is why it helps so much to have an interpreter recruit and deal directly with interpreters. The recruiter as administrator From a strictly administrative viewpoint, my job is to provide the most service for the least money. My bottom-line financial figure is the unit cost: the average amount my organization has to pay in order to have a body in the booth for a day. The recruiter as interpreter Let me tell you, then, on what basis I choose my free lances. The three main criteria are quality, versatility and overall professionalism. Quality is more than a sheerly linguistic concept: many an interpreter knows his languages inside and out, misses nothing, makes no serious mistakes, and yet does not quite succeed in interpreting altogether satisfactorily. The main problem is too much of an obsession with words and not enough attention to sense. I prefer professionals who are prone to talk less and say what really counts, idiomatically, with elegance, precision, natural intonation and poise. I find it difficult to put up with practitioners who sound bored and boring, or have a halting delivery, or scarcely pause to take breath and then at the wrong places. In that, I am irritated by the same things that irk any listener in any speaker. I want my interpreters to be top-notch communicators. Versatility is also important. I try to avoid relay at all costs. Other things being equal, the first interpreters to get the offers are those with more relevant passive languages. Colleagues equally at ease in two booths come next. Professionalism involves several series of factors, having to do respectively with the interpreters' attitude towards his audience, his colleagues and me. A decisive factor is, of course, thorough preparation for a meeting. Then, I seek honesty: if the interpreter has not understood something or is not sure about anything he deems essential, I want him to say so over the microphone and let his audience decide whether they want to stop the speaker and ask him to repeat. Next I treasure a user-friendly professional; someone who is constantly mindful of his audience's specific needs, who will strive to find out what they are and then tailor his approach accordingly. As to the interpreters' booth manners, let me stress punctuality, constant presence in the booth, and helpfulness towards his colleagues, especially when working with a beginner or someone with no previous experience with a specific meeting. More decisive than most outsiders make it is personal hygiene. Lastly I look for a sociable personality, emmerdeurs are low on my priority list. Some interpreters have added responsibilities. The English booth, in particular, which is normally in direct contact with both Chairman and Secretary of a meeting must be mindful of any problems their colleagues in other booths may encounter. Pivots, on their part, have a special responsibility vis-à-vis their colleagues, who are, after all, their most vulnerable users. Regardless of the difficulties he may have with the original, it is the pivot's responsibility to ensure that his colleagues will be spared a halting, incoherent speech. A pivot who does not interpret with those who must relay from him primarily in mind is wanting both as an interpreter and as a colleague. Lastly, I want my people to be good to me. Crucially, I seek interpreters who will be ready to make an extra effort and help me out when I am up a tree, even - or rather especially - if it is through my own fault. The interpretation market The UN system market is shrinking. There are three main reasons for this: political, financial and academical. A new financial earthquake occurred in September 1993, but this time around, the root causes were entirely political: with the collapse of the USSR our world has become unipolar. Once one of the poles holding the rope of multilateralism we were all walking is all but gone, the rope cannot but slacken. Does this mean that interpretation is no longer needed? Not at all. But those who really need us are in no position to call the shots - let alone pay. One would be blind not to see the consequences of the present situation for the interpretation market, and with it for the profession. Then there is the proliferation of interpreter schools, some excellent, producing a host of outstanding young professionals with the same language combination. Many are incomparably better prepared and motivated than many self-made old-timers, who see their traditional slice of the market disappear. On their part, novices find it increasingly difficult to find a place in an overcrowded market. It is not an indulgent place for those who have nothing to sell but their ability to work, our new market. But that's the way the unipolar cookie crumbles. One of its consequences is that AIIC is being sued by the FTC for "monopolistic practices", not financial, mind you, but strictly professional. Fie, for example, the interpreter who demands to have a booth-mate, or adequate working conditions: let he who is ready to work alone in a cubicle in a corridor outside the conference room for any length of time survive, while the profession goes down the drain, and professional dignity, pride and quality with it. AIIC's role The importance of AIIC as the only international organization of conference interpreters cannot be overestimated. Ideally, all good interpreters should be members and all bad interpreters excluded. Alas, it is not quite so. Many - perhaps most - good young professionals remain indifferent, and, recruiter that I am, I can vouch for the fact that a few of its members are not of the required calibre. The latter fact will resolve itself, I hope, with time and natural turnover. But AIIC's inability to recruit so many promising youngsters is extremely worrisome. Many criticisms can be levelled against any professional organization, and AIIC is no exception, but mankind has still to see any group of workers or professionals uphold and improve their lot without a union - a strong union - whatever its shortcomings. And, that I know of, history boasts no precedents where any kind of union, even a weak and squabbling one, has been worse than none at all. One thing must be brought home to all our colleagues who for whatever reason are reluctant to join their only professional association: the profession as we know it and as we wish it to develop is in danger. In the face of this unprecedented crisis, an interpreter cannot but be either part of the solution or part of the problem: and it is my deep conviction that being outside AIIC, whatever the grounds, is being part of the problem. I work for "the other side" - I know whereof I speak. Client/user/administrator-education I would like to come back to the professionalization of the profession and dwell on what to me is an essential task to be collectively accomplished by all of us, interpreters: that of educating our clients - administrators, recruiters, speakers and audience - about what it is and what it therefore takes to be a conference interpreter, and what is thus needed for us to perform at our best. This we cannot hope to do individually: we need a professional association capable of pooling, systematizing and disseminating our individual experience and reflections. We are a new profession; our founding fathers are mostly still with us, a few even go on interpreting. Our intuitive, haphazard, improvised beginnings are not that far behind. It is not surprising, then, that the professionalization of the profession is only at its initial stages. We have not even succeeded in establishing our own academic and professional title: in those corners of the market where AIIC has failed to establish itself, anybody who claims to be an interpreter is considered to be one until repeatedly proven wrong. Anybody's claims to such or such active, or, especially, passive language are more or less taken at face value. And even within AIIC's own ranks, a few C, B and even A languages are dubious. But before we set out to campaign in enemy territory, we have many things to learn and understand about ourselves. Is interpreting as stressful as we claim? Is there a medical basis for manning strength or workload? How many hours at a time, per day or per week is too much? In what circumstances? Is teleconferencing more stressful than normal interpreting? Is there any neurophysiological basis behind our ability to interpret into a given language as opposed to out of it? And in that light, what is a B language, an A minus or a C plus? What is more effective, to interpret from your mother tongue, which presumably has no secrets for you, into a foreign language you do not know so well or the other way round? We claim that we need to see both speakers and audience; but why? Can we prove it? Can we explain why we have more trouble with written speeches than with spontaneous ones? And if so, can we prove that we can do a better job with a written speech if given the text? Are interpreters born or made? And if they are indeed born, have they not still to be made like most other performers? If so, what is the best, most effective way of making an interpreter? I am sure we all have our own answers to all or many of these questions. I am also sure that in many cases they will differ. The problem lies in the intuitive nature of such answers, as well as in the inevitably limited individual experience of each of us. In order to be proved, they must be tested, both experimentally and in practice, and not just in our individual practice, but in all possible conditions: international political conferences, local private-business gatherings, specialized seminars, the courts, TV and radio; one-way and two-way; cultivated and uncultivated speakers and audiences; all manner of accents and speech problems; all manner of physical conditions, with and without visibility, with and without texts, with and without ventilation; formal interventions and improvised dialogue; the poised questions of the diplomat and the broken answers of a child refugee; between the international languages of ambassadors or between the different dialects of victims of a civil war. The answers will have, in the long run, financial consequences for every practitioner, since it will determine workload standards, manning strength and working conditions for different types of meetings, and therefore both job opportunities and remuneration. In this decisive struggle for the establishment and scientific definition and description of our profession, academic institutions have, of course, a decisive role to play. It is up to them to come up with the relevant insights and data. After all, who among us, has relevant experience in all the above-mentioned areas? Who among us is ready to stop working for a few years in order just to collect his thoughts and write down his observations? Who among us has the qualifications correctly to carry out and interpret observations and experiments, plus the statistical knowledge necessary to generalize the conclusions? But practitioners must lend their full support, and above all, ensure that research and experimentation are carried out by people fully conversant with our profession and are based squarely on relevant interpretational practice. It is here that AIIC's contribution cannot but prove equally decisive. We are in the middle of the greatest crisis this profession has ever known, and most of us have more pressing problems than academic speculation. But there is a future, and it is nigh. We can ill afford to let ourselves be caught up in it unawares, and it is a professional organization such as AIIC that will help us prepare to survive, grow and develop.
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