1. Introduction
Finland’s accession to the European Union on January 1, 1995 introduced Finnish as one of the official languages of the Union. This gave rise to the need for translation and interpretation between Finnish and other official languages in the European institutions. The accession had two major impacts on the Finnish inter
preting market. Firstly, the demand for qualified conference interpreters multiplied, and, secondly, measures were urgently needed to meet the new requirements.
This paper discusses the recruitment of interpreters before and after Finland’s accession, the problems faced by providers and receivers of interpretation both in the EU institutions and in Finland, and the need for organization of interpreter training. The topic is approached from the perspectives of interpreters, the prospec
tive audience, service providers, and trainers. The findings derive mainly from my own experiences as a free-lance interpreter and a trainer of interpreters.
2. Recruitment to cover the growing demand
After the entry of three new member states, the Interpreting Services of both the European Parliament and the Commission had to find and recruit dozens of new interpreters, whose qualifications met their rather strict requirements. On the basis of their CV’s, free-lance candidates were invited for tests organized both in Finland and in Brussels in the autumn of 1994. Those who passed are now working for the Institutions under various arrangements; in fact, there are now periods when Fin
land is more or less cleaned out of experienced conference interpreters. For exam
ple, the Parliament’s monthly part-session in Strasbourg alone employs approxi
mately 30 Finnish interpreters for one week. This figure can be placed in a better perspective with the earlier situation, when we remember that before the accession, there were about 20 active full-time or near full-time conference interpreters in Finland.
3. New assignments and challenges
For Finnish interpreters, the first year has meant not only more work but also new kinds of assignments. One challenge of the EU assignments is that they require instant mastery of a huge body of new concepts and terms, for which Finnish equiv
alents have not been established or do not even exist. It has been estimated that about one thousand new European terms were adopted into Finnish in the context of the
Section 1. Preparations for European Integration
accession (Vihonen 1996). Furthermore, the agenda of one meeting often contains a wide range of items covering a multitude of special fields and technical terms. For example, the main items of the agenda of the May part-session are described as fol
lows in the Pre-session Briefing of 10 May, 1996:
MEP’s return to Strasbourg for a timely debate on efforts to combat football hooliganism. - The question of television rights to sporting events will also be on the agenda.
The Commissions’s annual farm price proposals are also down for debate, which could, once again, be dominated by the BSE crisis, while Parliament’s own expenditure, and in particular the cost of the new Strasbourg building will come under close scrutiny in two reports.
Other items include food and humanitarian aid, relations with South America, telecommunications liberalization, air quality, waste dumps, foreign policy, aid for Palestinians, health and safety, poverty programme, population control in developing countries, industrial co-operation with Eastern European coun
tries and when a picture is not a picture.
Another major challenge is relay (retour/return) interpreting, i.e. interpreting from Finnish into, e.g. English, French, and German, from which the message is then interpreted into the rest of the eleven official languages. This amounts to a par
tial rejection of the established rule that interpreters should only work into their A-language, as most of the relays (pivots) of the Finnish booth are native speakers of Finnish.
The Finnish audience, i.e. the Members of the European Parliament, Ministers, and other representatives in the various Institutions, have had to accommodate to the fact that interpreting could not always be organized to meet their needs, because interpreters or equipment simply were not available. The first reactions of the audi
ence could perhaps be summarized in a comment made by one Finnish MEP after the first six months: “We did receive a lot of speech via our earphones, but it was not really Finnish.” Another comment by a member of the Committee of the Regions after a meeting in May 1995, where Finnish interpretation was finally available for the first time, illustrates the relief after having and being understood: “Thank you, we finally felt like human beings.”
On the other hand, the interpreting provided has not always been regarded as adequate. This is partly related to the terminology issues referred to above; partly it has to do with the fact that Finnish is the first non-Indo-European language in the Union. A further obstacle is that the Finnish contributions are constructed in a man
ner that makes the interpreter’s job extremely difficult. The contributions are almost always read at an extremely fast speed from a script with hardly any redundancy.
Finnish texts translated for EU purposes have also been criticized for displaying vari
ous features of source text complexity and ambiguity (Rautala 1996), but the prob
lem is more acute for interpreters, who are completely at the mercy of the pace set by the speakers and cannot stop to check something that was said earlier in the text.
In a situation such as the European Parliament’s plenary, where the speakers have a very limited time at their disposal, constraints of time, linearity and (un)shared
MariannaSunnari
knowledge inherent in simultaneous interpreting (Schlesinger 1996) may sometimes become overwhelming.
4. Implications for training
The growing demand for interpreting has also increased the need for training.
During the first year, courses were organized in Brussels by the Parliament and the Commission for Nordic trainees. In Finland, the Centre for Translation and Inter
preting of the University of Turku has given one eight-month post-M.A. course in conference interpreting, funded by the Ministry of Education. The second special
ized eight-month course started in Turku in the first week of September this year.
Although the need for interpreters is great, it has not been easy to find trainees who meet the generally accepted requirements, i.e. M.A.-level university degree, excellent Finnish and two other EU languages, good general knowledge, and general aptitude for conference interpreting. For example, out of the about 140 applicants for the second course in Turku, only 12 were accepted and of them 9 have now started the course. Nevertheless, we are now convinced that the selection process plays a crucial role in the success of the course; no training can activate or enhance skills that are inadequate or do not exist at all. Two further aspects of training appear to be of special interest in this context. In what follows, I will focus on interpreting from Finnish into English, but I believe that the remarks below are relevant to other Indo- European languages as well.
Although those involved in the selection of trainees and the planning and imple
mentation of the courses have long experience in similar projects, the inclusion of a non-Indo-European language in the training and practical work seems to require methods and approaches different from those applied so far. It seems, for example, that a fluent, idiomatic delivery from and into Finnish requires the interpreter to work with rather large chunks of information (Sunnari 1995a, 1995b). Those work
ing from Finnish into English therefore need special training, which focusses on the contrastive differences between the two languages and facilitates the development of coping strategies. What is aimed at is an accurate, well-segmented rendering readily comprehensible both to the English-speaking audience and to the interpreters con
veying the message from English into other languages.
It has become clear from discussions with colleagues taking English relay from the Finns that they prefer listening to a delivery with a good rhythm and segmenta
tion, a clear, properly stressed pronunciation, and a steady flow of complete sen
tences. A native accent, for example, is regarded as less important.
However, the needs of the two audiences may sometimes contradict each other.
The relatively long time lag necessary to reformulate the input message into idiomatic, well-segmented English, may cause problems for those listening to the pivots. Some listeners tend to regard the pauses resulting from the processing of the “larger chunks”
as signals of uncertainty or hesitation, which they dislike. There is also disagreement on, e.g. which variant of English to use and how to deal with culture-specific con
cepts. While some disagreements arise from personal preferences, others may impair comprehension and should be discussed in training sessions.
Section 1. Preparations for European Integration
5. Conclusions
The accession to the European Union has caused great changes in the Finnish interpreting market. While the need to find and recruit new interpreters was antici
pated and taken into account well in advance, other changes, such as the need for training of interpreters in general and that of pivots in particular, were not suffi
ciently addressed during Finland’s preparation for the intergration. After the acces
sion, interpreters, who had been a rather “invisible” group in the Finnish labour market, suddenly found themselves thrust into the limelight. Although the availabil
ity and quality of translations and interpreting have improved during the first eigh
teen months of our EU membership, a great deal remains to be done to reach the level of the services provided for the “old” member states, especially in view of Finland’s Presidency in 1999.
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