The Spirit of Malinalli: Finding strength in high-stakes interpreting

I want to open this post with a short passage from Laura Esquivel's masterpiece novel Malinche, which is an evocative, beautiful work of historical fiction about the life of Hernan Cortes' interpreter Malinalli, a polyglot slave who was thrust into the role of interpreter for Cortes during his conquest of the Mexica people. It imagines her as a thoughtful and spiritual character, who struggled with the responsibility of her role as an interpreter, just as many modern interpreters do as they grapple with the implications of their own roles as conduits for the communication of others in high-stakes environments.

"Being "the Tongue" involved an enormous spiritual commitment. It meant placing her entire being at the service of the gods so that her tongue could become part of a divine sound system, so that her voice might spread the very sense of existence throughout the cosmos. But Malinalli did not feel prepared for this. Often, when she spoke, she let herself be led by her desires, and when that happened, the voice that came out of her mouth was none other than that of fear. Fear of being unfaithful to her gods, fear of failure, fear of not being able to handle the responsibility and - why not? - fear of power. Of the taking of power."*

It was eery for me to read that passage as I followed Malinalli's journey, because that is exactly how I feel about interpreting. And one of the most important insights I've gathered in recent weeks is that indeed, when I let myself be controlled by my own anxieties, emotions, and reactions surrounding what I interpret, my interpretation is colored and affected by this. However, when I am calm, confident, and focused outward, on the people I am supporting, my interpretation is more likely to truly reflect the spirit and the voice of the people speaking through me.

To put this in context, over the last several months, I've been working heavily with asylum cases, both in and out of court, and the impact of this work on me has been startling. It can be emotionally taxing not only to give voice to painful stories, repeating the communication in the first person as interpreters must do, but also to be responsible for the accurate conveyance of those stories when the accuracy of the interpretation can, effectively, change the course of someone's life.

The interpreter bears an enormous responsibility, especially in adjudicative settings. In immigration court and in asylum interviews, the interpreter's rendition of the respondent's testimony can affect credibility findings. Furthermore, the formality of those settings makes it difficult to employ tactics to fix broken communication: for example, if someone's answer is ambiguous and hard to understand, it's not always appropriate to ask for more information so that the interpretation can be clear.

As an interpreter, I second guess myself constantly. Did I choose the right word to reflect the tenor and tone of the what she is communicating? Did I interpret the question/answer in the exact way it was asked/given, or did I make it more confusing? Or less confusing (also, perhaps surprisingly to some, problematic)?

I'm in the process of finding peace with this running internal dialogue and my own "interpreter anxiety," because I can't actually get rid of it. There was a great post on the NAJIT observer this week by Athena Matilsky, an experienced court interpreter who now trains and coaches interpreters, that speaks to precisely this issue. It was a breath of fresh air, because often I think interpreters don't want to admit to anxiety or feelings of inadequacy, because our ability to get work depends on our ability to market ourselves as excellent. But Athena normalizes these very common feelings, and shares these fantastic takeaways:

• Interpreting is stressful. Anxiety is common. You can’t expect it to go away.
• Therefore…you must practice dealing with anxiety productively.
• You must recognize the feeling of confidence and calm, and learn to re-create it in more stressful situations.
• You will often fail before you succeed. Failure only counts as failure if you let it stop you from achieving what you want.
• There is no such thing as perfection. I repeat: No. Such. Thing!
• You must believe you are the best interpreter there ever was. Then, practice until you are.
• Most importantly: Don’t forget to breathe!

These are some fundamental truths about interpreting that I might not have been able to recognize even eight months ago. To interpret is to be anxious; to interpret well is to deal with that anxiety productively, by remembering how it feels to be confident and calm and also by quieting the voice that tells you if you are not perfect, then you are not excellent. 

I also want to close with one more thought and one more resource. Sometimes, the interpreter's exposure to the trauma they interpret, combined or not with the pressure of an adjudicative setting, leaves the interpreter with what is called vicarious trauma. I've felt it, but didn't know how to recognize it until I talked to a therapist and realized I had a problem, but the problem wasn't my abilities, it was the context in which I was applying them and how that work affects me. There's a great curriculum (and the training is offered a couple times a year here in DC and elsewhere) called Breaking Silence: Interpreting for Victim's Services. Here is a discussion of the project on the ATA Chronicle by the curriculum's author and my personal hero Marjory Bancroft, and the curriculum is available to read here. Some lessons aren't applicable to court, but it does do the important work of acknowledging and normalizing the struggles of interpreters handling difficult subject matter.

As always, thanks for reading, and best of luck to all my colleagues who share with me this tremendous responsibility.

*In the original Spanish: "Ser <<la Lengua>> implicaba un gran compromiso espiritual, era poner todo su ser al servicio de los dioses para que su lengua fuera parte del aparato sonoro de la divinidad, para que su voz esparciera por el cosmos el sentido mismo de la existencia, pero Malinalli no se sentía preparada para ello. Muy a menudo, al hablar, se dejaba guiar por sus deseos y entonces la voz que salía por su boca no era otra que la del miedo. Miedo a no ser fiel a sus dioses, miedo a fallar, miedo a no poder con la responsibilidad y - ¿por qué no? - miedo al poder. A la toma del poder."

Updates and new interpreting adventures!

I thought I'd write a practical post about what I've learned and what I've been up to over the last few months in my interpreting practice. I've been working steadily to grow my practice, to meet new clients, and to build my skills so that I can provide ever better service and better access to services to clients that need me to handle their person-to-person communication.

Over the past few months, I've started a wonderful relationship with Ayuda, the interpreter bank in DC funded by the DC Bar to provide free interpreter services to pro-bono lawyers. Some of my favorite assignments have come from Ayuda: meetings about discovery in ongoing cases, immigration clinics, asylum cases, and more. As a lawyer-to-be myself, all of it is fascinating, and all of it a learning experience.

I've also had the opportunity to take on my first conferences, something I've been wanting to do (but was too afraid to do) for a long time. Despite the fact that I've been trained to do the work, and educated on protocols and professionalism, I just felt like the stakes were too high or the work too demanding. However, I took the plunge when I accepted an assignment from one of my agencies that was a series of presentations for new students at a local charter school for adult education...and when that went off without a hitch, I felt like I could accept more complex simultaneous work. Last week, I was booked and gathered together an interpreter team for a brilliant conference on Economic and Policy Leadership for the Women of Color Network. I rented the SI equipment from another colleague, put together a collaborative spreadsheet of terminology based on the documents that the organizers sent us ahead of time (a dream to work with them; I've heard horror stories of interpreters not getting presentation materials until the 11th hour and then being expected to be ready to interpret flawlessly on the day of the conference), and by the time the conference rolled around, I was ready to interpret at the top of my game. It's a miracle, really, when you are on the mic and hearing and processing what the speaker says in perfect time to deliver a fluid and at times even elegant interpretation.

Side note for my fellow interpreters: the WOCN found me because of my NAJIT membership, so keep those memberships up to date. Not just for work, of course: I've learned so much by participating in the NAJIT Facebook, which is truly a repository of interpreting experience and excellence. It also helps to participate in these forums to stay up to date on what is happening within the industry, from what agencies are hiring and are good to work for to the scams that are going around. Unfortunately, given the need to be on the constant lookout for work, a lot of interpreters and translators are targeted by unscrupulous individuals and agencies. Watch out for poorly written emails, messy websites, and mysterious requests for your CV: all of these are signs of less than honest dealing. When in doubt, ask your colleagues! 

But I could never say that!

Let's talk about interpreting off-color language, which is honestly among my favorite topics. Firstly because I love colorful language in all its forms, and part of me finds it entertaining to interpret swearing in venues where normally I would (personally) only use the most formal of language. But more importantly, I love to talk about this because the idea that an interpreter has to interpret anything (yes, really, anything!) that is is said is probably one of the least intuitively understood principles both by interpreters and non-interpreters alike, should they stop to think about it. That, and the other great accuracy-related principle, interpreting in first person - but that's a topic for another day.

It's always very interesting to discuss cursing in training, because in every class I've taught, in all the years I've trained interpreters, it always goes almost exactly like this.

Me: So interpreters have to interpret accurately, right?

Class: Yes!!

Me: What would happen if an interpreter decided to leave certain parts out?

Participant: The whole message wouldn't get through. It would be wrong for the interpreter to leave parts out of the message.

Me: Right. Now, this applies to literally everything that is said. Some people are surprised when I tell them this, but it applies to curse words and offensive language, too.

(the class starts to murmur)

Participant: But it would be rude for us to say those words. People would be offended. I think maybe we should just tell the other side that the person is cursing or using rude language, but not give any details.

....And then we spend probably the next three days litigating this point on and off, until the entire class finally buys in, minus usually one or two particularly proper hold outs. That is their great loss, and I hope they change their minds before they ever interpret professionally in a matter that could have a significant impact on peoples' lives.

What does this mean? It means the impulse to be polite is strong! It means that in training and in our professional conversations, especially with new interpreters, we have to emphasize that interpreting accurately means interpreting everything. Even when it's shocking. Especially when it's shocking.

And isn't there a certain mischief and mirth in that?

I'll leave you with this great 1-minute video from Clarity Interpreting on the topic. I also have been playing around with the Amara subtitling platform again (see my stuff!) to do some captioning of training videos as part of a favor for the wonderful folks at Ayuda here in DC who are offering The Language of Justice this month and are letting me join that training. So that's why this very easy to understand video happens to have English captions. Enjoy!

Wait, so...it doesn't have to be perfect? Coping tactics from master interpreters

Before I begin, I really feel the need to caveat this post before I haul out just enough rope to absolutely hang myself. The job of the interpreter is to faithfully and accurately interpret all aspects of the speaker's message, matching register, style, and tone. If the speaker asks "Are you currently employed" and my interpretation to my target language is more equivalent to "You got a job?" then I have not done my job as an interpreter to a particularly high standard because I have altered the register and quite possibly the tone, even if I left the meaning intact.

I have taught perfect accuracy as the standard to my interpreter trainees for the last six years, and as a result have probably left some of the more conscientious among them as neurotic as I myself am about accuracy in interpreting and translation (I'm sorry, friends! But as they say, if you aim for the stars, you'll at least land on the moon, and that's not a bad thing). So for me, the most mind-blowing takeaway I've gotten from this training by MCS is that it doesn't actually have to be perfect, and that in fact, the most expert interpreters employ what are called "coping tactics" (more on this in a moment) to smoothly handle problems such as not understanding part of a speaker's utterance, forgetting a word, or momentarily losing their concentration - all without negatively impacting the message or its flow. To underscore the legitimacy of what I'm saying, the workshops included in this training are being being delivered by a federally certified court interpreter who also happens to be a rater for the federal court interpretation exam, an AIIC-member conference interpreter who interprets for the highest levels of government, and a former dean of the Monterey Institute (now Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey). That is to say, these are authoritative speakers. Or totally legit, depending on the register you prefer.

So what are coping tactics? They include, but are not limited to....

• Delaying
• Paraphrasing (a little bit)
• Circumlocution
• Re-sequencing

How does it work? Let's say you forget for a moment what comes next in your consecutive delivery. But you don't want to damage your speakers' confidence in your skills, or irritate them with constant requests to repeat themselves. So rather than hemming and hawing and leaving a big gap in your rendition, maybe you buy yourself some time and just quickly repeat yourself, or say the next thing after the thing you forgot, while you decipher those scribbled notes and make vows to improve your handwriting. However, you still make sure you remain faithful to that message and know that you must come back to what you forgot, either by asking for repetition or remembering - finally. It goes with out saying that you had better be sure that the message is not one that would be seriously harmed by such re-sequencing. Like medical instructions: there is a difference between "eat lunch, wait an hour, and take the pill, and "eat lunch, take the pill, and wait an hour". Don't do that, kids, that would be wrong and you might hurt someone. 

So that's what coping tactics are. Master interpreters use them judiciously and sparingly to preserve the integrity of a message and keep communication flowing properly. It's a complex balancing act, and whether or not to employ coping tactics is one of the many background tasks that skilled interpreters handle with grace and elegance while analyzing and interpreting all the messages included in an interpreted encounter. It's a relief to know that this is one of the tools I can use as an interpreter, although deep down inside-well, I still just think it should be perfect.

I'll leave you with this excellent video by court and community interpreter Katharine Allen on how to handle unfamiliar terms in both consecutive and simultaneous settings, where she describes some of the coping tactics mentioned above, with all due caveats on maintaining accuracy:

Do as I say, not as I did: The trainer goes back to school

Since I stopped practicing as a community interpreter about seven or eight years ago and started training interpreters six years ago, I have harbored a small piece of guilty knowledge. Here it is, guys. Please don't judge me.

I honestly learned more about interpreting as a trainer than I knew when I was actually interpreting. 

That's it! I was not an expert interpreter when I became a trainer. It was not until later, while managing and monitoring interpreters, and through self-study and eventually training as a trainer, that I really grew in my knowledge of what an interpreter SHOULD DO and HOW they should do it. And the more I learned, the more cognizant I became of the fact that my own capabilities were not the top shelf skills I thought they were when I was last hopping from appointment to appointment back in Seattle almost a decade ago.

It's logical that this would be the case, since I interpreted for less than three years and then landed a position of responsibility promoting best practices and teaching interpreters how to work. I was teaching a complex and often misunderstood skill set, and was often questioned about the best practices that I believed in, so I figured I had to know it inside and out, right? I learned how to explain ethics and best practices a hundred different ways, and talk new interpreters (and experienced interpreters with the bad habits of the self-taught) through the norms of their profession. I'm proud to have spent the last several years, both full-time and as part of ancillary functions of my other social service roles, welcoming interpreters into the profession and promoting excellence in interpreted communication. Yet, I worry that I myself was not the best interpreter at all times, and worse, that I didn't even know it. It's been many years and I can't effectively self-evaluate my performance from 2009, but I am fairly confident that I didn't consistently provide full, accurate interpretation. I liken this to what a zealous convert must feel, passionately preaching the good news but dwelling on the memory of past unconfessed transgression.

In search of redemption and for the love of this amazing, challenging, and critical profession of community interpreting, I've been waiting for the right opportunity try my hand at putting into practice what I've been teaching for the last six years. I believe I've found just that moment. I'm starting law school this fall at Georgetown University, which thankfully has an evening program which will allow me the opportunity to pursue my dream of getting back into language services and being the interpreter I've been telling others they should be.

Naturally, I want to re-build those skills (and maybe build some I never had before) and I am so grateful to be currently participating in a 70-hour training offered by Multicultural Community Services (MCS) here in the nation's capital. The next blog post will be about this incredible training and the insights I'm already pulling from it (both as a trainer and as a would-be interpreter), just two days in. Stay tuned! There's so much to tell.