Speaker: Hiromi Green, Distinguished Speaker (DS)
Session Title: Interpreting Theories and a Holistic Approach for Japanese to/from English Interpreters
Review Author: Allyson Sigman
In her school, Grin’s Academy, Hiromi-sensei’s motto for her students is「にっこり笑顔で切磋琢磨」. This passion for professional development and encouragement was clear in her talk.
Initially, she touched on the differences between European- and Japanese-style interpreter training. The former is generally an MA program based on theory of meaning and incorporates collaborative learning methods and the latter is a vocational school with a top-down approach where students are expected to imitate their professor, often valuing a word-for-word interpretation instead of taking meaning as a whole in the broader context of culture.
Next, she covered the difference between interpreting and translation. For translators to become interpreters, there needs to be a mindset shift from perfection to prioritizing communication. Often, there are bits of meaning that cannot be conveyed in interpreting due to time constraints. Hiromi-sensei explained that good translators often can shift to interpreting, but good interpreters struggle to shift into translation. Once a translator has honed the craft of understanding a source text and getting all the words in the right place in the target language to convey the same meaning, it is easy to drop some for a quicker, more natural target interpretation. However, interpreters tend to think a translation is good enough and ignore the details of meaning that might have been omitted in the written product.
Hiromi-sensei also highlighted the benefits of human interpretation over AI. She gave a list of things that only human interpreters can provide, such as:
- The ability to read the room.
- Help navigating the area.
- Onsite (sight) translation.
- Company and small talk.
These may be seen as “not the interpreter’s job, but they are valuable to our clients. There will always be clients with plenty of money who value quality over cost savings.
Finally, she left us with a challenge. To succeed in interpreting in an AI-dominated world, we will need to hone not only interpreting skills, but also people skills. What will differentiate quality human interpreters is:
- Manners and appearance
- Mindset and resilience
- Voice training
- Cross-cultural awareness
- And most of all, community!
Edited by: audra lincoln
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