IW 138: InterpreTips: Processing Patterns of Practice

I see what you did there. I didn't understand it, but I see it.

We don't need to know the language to know if an interpretation is effective or not. I discuss how we can analyze our practice work to improve our interpretation skills to serve the communities better.

Similar to Sharon Neumann Solow's experience I share my story of how I could teach an interpreting program without be highly fluent in the languages used.

LINKS mentioned:

• IW Community
  • 10-50% OFF workshops, seminars, and more.
• Sharon's new book! (Use promo code IWCurry for 10% Discount.)
  • Give a note to ask for a signed copy!
• Stay tuned for upcoming workshops!

Transcript

IW 138: InterpreTips: Processing Patterns of Practice

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[ROCK INTRO MUSIC STARTS]

00:00:02 Tim [ONLY TIM SPEAKS IN THIS EPISODE]

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Wherever you are, this is the Interpreter's Workshop podcast. I'm Tim Curry, your host. Here we talk everything sign language interpreting the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the sideways of interpreting. If you're a student, a new interpreter, experienced interpreter, this is the place for you. If you want to know more, go to interpretersworkshop.com.

00:00:28 

Let's start talking... interpreting.

[ROCK INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

00:00:34

And now the quote of the day by famous comedian and actor Charlie Chaplin.

00:00:42

“Life is a tragedy when seen close up, but a comedy in a long shot.”

00:00:50

He uses these terms of film makers, a close up and a long shot. When we look at something up close and in detail, we can see all the imperfections, the mistakes, the sadness.

00:01:05

But when we move away from those details, when we move further out and look at life as a whole, we can start seeing the humor in it, just as when we make a mistake, or we have a horrible experience over time. Sometimes we can laugh, definitely laugh at it.

00:01:25

We pulled away from the closeness we become further and further away from those emotions that it's tied to.

00:01:35

And therefore, we can see the humor in it.

00:01:37

Today, let's talk about our interpreting practice and what it means to be seen in close up or in a longshot.

00:01:47

Let's see whether it's a tragedy or a comedy.

00:01:50

And maybe what it tells us about us.

00:01:54

Let's get started.

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

00:02:00

We all have stories in our lives that we tell friends sitting around visiting, having coffee or…

00:02:07

When we meet new friends and we're going into the conversation about who we are, what we do, and those stories that we bring up during those times are stories that we can laugh at now.

00:02:18

They are stories that mean a lot to us because we've learned from them because they've made an impact on who we are.

00:02:25

They made that emotional memory reference point.

00:02:29

That we keep coming back to over and over because it's a great story.

00:02:35

It's now tragic, but it's also comedic and it's a way for us to relate to others, to connect to other humans.

00:02:43

One of the stories that I tell often is about our trips back and forth from here to the U.S.

00:02:51

Every year we travel back to the US to visit family and friends, and every time we have an adventure on this flight.

00:03:00

Especially since we now have a young child and those adventures have been wild roller coasters at times.

00:03:09

Sometimes they come to the point where we feel like we're not traveling ever again.

00:03:16

One such story is when…

00:03:18

Just a few years ago, we traveled to the US and Border Patrol, immigration, decided to have an interview with my wife.

00:03:29

But they wouldn't do it with me, nor our girl present. My wife was taken to the interview area, and I had to wait with our daughter in the baggage claim area where the snack machine was broken and the restrooms were closed.

00:03:47

Luckily, we only had to wait…

00:03:50

…four …hours. 

00:03:52

We had arrived around 6:00 or 7:00 PM in the evening, close to our daughter's bedtime. After about, you know, a 15-hour trip already. During those four hours, we missed our next flight to our final destination.

00:04:09

Many things happened, but as a result of that, we now travel a lot easier and with less complications.

00:04:17

We had to explain to my daughter that not all policemen are bad people who take her mother away. And yes, we can kind of smile at that.

00:04:28

I can make jokes about not having any food because all the snacks for our daughter were with my wife in her bag. So, we sat on the very comfortable plastic chairs that just happen to be nearby the baggage claim right in front of the closed restrooms, and the taunting vending machine that did not work.

00:04:48

So yes, I can make some jokes about that and even joke about the fact that during that time I picked up our luggage and as we were leaving, I realized I had taken someone else's luggage rather than ours.

00:05:02

But, I found out when I was talking to the baggage claim officer who just happened to be standing next to our luggage. So that worked out. But since that trip and other adventures that we've had with passport mishaps, resident card mishaps, scheduling, airline snafus...

00:05:21

So many wonderful adventures it has made us make decisions better about how we pack, how we double, triple, quadruple check everything before, during and even after we're traveling.

00:05:38

We only packed the essentials.

00:05:39

We pack all the liquids in a pocket that is easily accessible in our hand luggage in any electronics as well.

00:05:47

We know how to handle the child during the flight with ease… now.

00:05:52

“With ease” means you know 50% everything's great. And the only reason we know how to do all of these things now is because we learned from those little tiny mistakes, little decisions that we made that affected how the trip went, many things were out of our control, but we learned how to not have those out of control moments happen.

00:06:14

We learn how to steer clear completely that that situation would not happen again.

00:06:20

Why am I telling you this?

00:06:21

Because why don't we do that with our interpretations?

00:06:25

Those of you who get in group practice or who actually practice the profession, practice interpreting outside of the gigs outside of the assignments, you know that when you're practicing, you're improving, learning from mistakes.

00:06:39

You're analyzing your own work.

00:06:41

You're seeing the patterns.

00:06:44

Just like on our trips, we see the patterns, we see, the mistakes, the bad decisions, the situations that we get into, that we probably shouldn't have gotten into.

00:06:55

And we learn from them.

00:06:56

So, we don't do them again.

00:06:58

But yet the whole routine, the whole schema of traveling, we know.

00:07:03

We know even better because we know the patterns that if we do this, this and this, we're going to get in this situation. If we don't do those, we'll have a new situation.

00:07:13

So, we avoid the bad patterns.

00:07:15

So, that's what we should also do when we're practicing.

00:07:19

In our work we should look at the patterns and avoid them.

00:07:22

Don't get ourselves into those situations. Those situations that cause bad decisions to be made or stressful situations to happen.

00:07:33

What's funny is during those situations when I'm sitting there waiting for four hours, I'm going over and over and over in my mind.

00:07:41

What was it that I did that caused this situation?

00:07:46

My wife would, in this particular story, my wife would definitely tell you. I talk too much and that got us into the situation.

00:07:54

I freely offered extra information that the Border Patrol agent did not need but helped him make a decision that gave us the situation we had.

00:08:04

So now I know that any time we're traveling, I will get that look.

00:08:09

That special look that says keep your mouth shut.

00:08:12

Hmm.

00:08:12

I just remembered that my wife is also listening to these episodes, but she's probably nodding.

00:08:18

Exactly.

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

00:08:24

So, how do you analyze your own work?

00:08:26

How do you practice effectively?

00:08:30

Well, we need to see what we're doing.

00:08:33

So, obviously you would record your interpretation a pretend interpretation.

00:08:39

And then just watch it, analyze it, look for things that don't look correct. Not correct in the sense that it's wrong, although that would also be something you want to look at. But look at the overall picture.

00:08:52

What is it about it?

00:08:53

What is the feeling you get from this interpretation? The work itself, what is it that you see?

00:08:59

And the problem is usually when you're looking at your own work, the problem is you already know the languages.

00:09:07

What do I mean by that?

00:09:08

For example.

00:09:10

We've all seen wonderful YouTube videos of different interpreters interpreting music. Or should I say signers signing music. Sometimes we look and say, oh, this is beautiful. This is awesome. That’s incredible.

00:09:25

That's cool. That's great.

00:09:27

And it's because we already know English.

00:09:29

We know the song or we love the song, but when we (and we've all done it), when we turn off the sound. Now what does it look like?

00:09:37

Does it still give you the same feeling.

00:09:39

Does it still give you that interpretation, the intention?

00:09:43

It's not the same as the actual song, is it?

00:09:46

And we can immediately see sometimes with the sound on whether or not the person knows what they're doing.

00:09:53

Is it an interpretation or is it a transliteration?

00:09:56

Or is it just gestures showing emotional acting talent? You can see that this person is not fluent in one of the languages, but if you don't know the languages, how do you tell?

00:10:09

Well, let's take the example of the interpreter for Nelson Mandela's memorial service.

00:10:14

We've all seen the videos at the time. Those of us who were in the profession, we saw that…

00:10:21

We immediately knew this person was not doing a good job.

00:10:25

Either they were not an interpreter, or they didn't have the skills for this platform because we could see the patterns that showed us, this is not an interpretation that's clear. This is not an interpretation that's good.

00:10:39

Even though we didn't know what language he was supposed to be signing. You could see, you could tell, with the sound on or off.

00:10:47

This is exactly what Sharon Neumann Solow was talking about in the recent episodes, referring to how she came about to write the new book.

00:10:58

Powerful Interpreting: Build Your Skills in 5 Steps.

00:11:03

In her story of going to Italy, and evaluating, mentoring, coaching the interpreters there, resonated with me 100%, OK 99.9%.

00:11:17

She didn't know the languages, Italian Sign language or spoken Italian, but yet she could see the patterns.

00:11:25

The patterns that we know as interpreters.

00:11:28

Maybe we haven't actually looked at them, but we know them inherently because of the muscles in our brain that we've strengthened by doing the interpreting process over and over again. The exact same thing happened to me when I came here.

00:11:44

When I first visited the Czech Republic, I came for about 18 days.

00:11:51

And during that time, I'd already learned some Czech sign language before, and of course during.

00:11:57

But I did know the language as well, specially spoken Czech.

00:12:01

That would be incredible if I had, however…

00:12:05

What that meant was I had to have a lot of conversations or communication through sign language interpreters here. Any event that I went to during that visit and during my first few months here.

00:12:21

Well, few years here…

00:12:22

I also had to use Czech sign language interpreters in meetings, conferences, workshops, lectures, etc.

00:12:30

I could tell the patterns that different interpreters had that told me whether this interpreter was very clear, and the interpretation was well done, or the opposite. And that became perfectly clear when I was asked by the deaf organization here to set up some courses for sign language interpreters or to take their sign language students and train them to be Czech Sign Language interpreters.

00:12:57

And in that program, that curriculum I was training and evaluating their interpreting skills.

00:13:03

But when we started that program, there were naysayers, people who disagreed with me, doing that because obviously I couldn't evaluate the languages correctly because I was not a fluent Czech speaker, nor was I highly fluent in Czech sign language at that time.

00:13:22

However, it became abundantly clear once I started training that I could evaluate the interpretation work, because I could see the patterns just like you can every time you look at another interpreter, even if you don't know the languages.

[ROCK TRANSITION MUSIC STARTS]

00:13:37

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00:13:41

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00:13:43

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00:13:58

Let's go back.

[ROCK TRANSITION MUSIC ENDS]

00:14:01

So, what was it that I noticed in my early days here?

00:14:06

Those patterns that help us evaluate the interpreting work without knowing the language.

00:14:12

Well, you could get Sharon Neumann Solow's book, and she goes into great detail to help us figure out what to look for, because as many of us on the podcast and outside the podcast have said, interpreting is interpreting the languages don't matter as much.

00:14:31

The interpreting process is the same.

00:14:34

There are some modality differences between spoken language and signed language interpreters, but on the whole, we can evaluate the work from my story. When I first arrived here as a visitor, I could tell the difference between very fluent signers and less fluent signers. Those who were influenced by the spoken Czech language and those who are not.

00:15:00

So just learning that part alone, seeing the influence in the language use by a source language or by the majority language that's when you can look at someone else's interpretation and say in this part I can see it's influenced by the source language.

00:15:20

The space was different. The referencing was different. And I don't have to explain that because most of you should understand just that sentence.

00:15:29

It's true.

00:15:30

And that's what you have to look for in your own work.

00:15:34

You will see it.

00:15:35

I'm using English structure here.

00:15:37

I'm not using the visual modality in the best way that I can.

00:15:41

I'm not using reference points in the best way I can.

00:15:45

And in other instances, I could see the interpretation had very few pauses.

00:15:51

It was a very rapid succession of signing that made it very difficult to understand how things were connected.

00:16:00

How things were emphasized or not emphaa- emphasized.

00:16:04

That’s hard to say quickly.

00:16:05

We use pauses to get attention, [pause] just like I did now.

00:16:11

We use pauses in many ways to make a point, to make our listeners think, to make them have suspense and wait for “what is the answer?”

00:16:23

“Who is the murderer?”, right?

00:16:26

All of those pauses gives the mind of the listener a place to think, to understand, to formulate opinions, to make connections between thoughts that we've given them.

00:16:39

And without those pauses, it's very hard for us to understand what was really meant.

00:16:45

Confusion is easy when we don't have the pauses.

00:16:50

So, when I see an interpretation which is just a rapid fire of signs and expressions so quickly with no pauses starting exactly the moment someone starts opening their mouth to the end and sometimes ending before they finish speaking.

00:17:06

It's too fast for most minds to comprehend, so that's a pattern that you can look at.

00:17:12

Whether you know the language or not.

00:17:14

You can.

00:17:14

At the reference points.

00:17:16

Who said what?

00:17:18

Are they role-shifting in the language you know, twisting your shoulders to the left or the right.

00:17:25

Eye contact left to right or eye contact to who is speaking to show the different speakers in the story in the conversation. Those reference points of who is the person saying this sentence and who is responding.

00:17:40

All of those reference points, including what it is that people are talking about. Without those connections, the interpretation is skewed, is confusing or just not clear.

00:17:53

So, that was another pattern I could see without knowing fully the languages.

00:18:00

I'm sure you're thinking of other points of the language of the interpreting process, where you can see without knowing the language…

00:18:09

What is happening?

00:18:10

You can tell whether someone is giving themselves enough processing time or too much, and they're forgetting something. So, that also helps you see that they need more (either) memory capacity or to shorten their processing time.

00:18:26

All of these things I recognized on my first visit and in the years since I moved here, realizing something about interpreting that I had not realized before I moved away from my comfort zone of ASL and English.

00:18:44

Even not knowing the cultures, I can still look at the interpreting work and see these patterns.

00:18:52

These are looking with a long shot of the interpretation rather than the close up of the details.

00:19:00

Charlie Chaplin was right. When we look close, we see the mistakes.

00:19:05

But when we look further away at something we start to see the patterns. It may still look like a tragedy.

00:19:14

But we can start to laugh at it and say, huh, I'm not doing that again.

00:19:20

That's what it's all about. Being able to look at it from a different way, a different perspective, to see the patterns of our practice and change it.

00:19:30

Stop doing those patterns.

00:19:34

We stop doing the things that put us in those situations.

00:19:38

We stop doing the things that create a situation where we have to make a decision which is stressful and ultimately not needed or should not have been needed to begin with, should not have been needed.

00:19:53

Whoo, that's some English grammar there for ya. [chuckles]

00:19:56

Interpret that one now.

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

[ROCK EXIT MUSIC STARTS]

00:20:03

So, the moral of this episode is practice, practice, practice.

00:20:09

Stop thinking about all the mistakes you've made in your past, personally and professionally.

00:20:16

Just remember not to do the same mistake twice.

00:20:20

Learn from them, and the only way we can learn from them is to admit them and look at them and see them.

00:20:26

See them for what they are.

00:20:28

Understand why.

00:20:30

Look at how it happened.

00:20:32

So, practice.

00:20:33

Record yourself.

00:20:34

Work with others to help you analyze it and you to support them as well.

00:20:40

If you're not sure how to do it, check out Sharon Neumann Solow’s book. That's a beautiful stepping off point.

00:20:47

This is a way for us to stop doing the same mistakes and start doing new ones because life is an adventure, we got to do something new, right?

00:20:58

Change your old habits into new habits.

00:21:00

Hopefully for the better.

00:21:02

And continue to do it.

00:21:04

Don’t get lazy.

00:21:05

I know we all do after a few years of interpreting; we all think, “I've got this.”

00:21:12

“I'm doing well.”

00:21:14

“I'm no longer that beginner interpreter who's worried about everything. My reputation included, but I've got it now.”

00:21:23

Do we?

00:21:24

I think it's time for us to look harder and see the patterns.

00:21:29

But don't worry, our wrinkles will show up.

00:21:31

And we will see them.

00:21:33

But we also know what caused them… experience.

00:21:37

So, keep calm. Keep interpreting… with new patterns.

00:21:43

I'll see you next week.

00:21:44

Take care now.

[ROCK EXIT MUSIC ENDS AT 00:22:21]