No.1piccaninnybelongMrs. Quin Repeat:
No. 1 piccaninnybelongMrs.Quin.
1. How many of you have understood what I am talking about? How many thought I was mad? How many thought I had drunk too much of that excellent Hungarian wine, Egri Bikavér? And yet, I am referring, in a language, which is basi
cally English - Pidgin English - to an internationally-known public figure: your friend and mine, His Royal Highness Prince Charles, Prince ofWales.
2. Let us now break down the words and analyse them, to discover why they denote the heir to the throne:
No. 1 first born
Piccaninny child
belong Mrs. Quin Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second
3. We have just done what a conference interpreter has to do both intellectually and instinctively in the booth: break though the word barrier and analyse the thought behind the words - which of course, we all do all the time.
4. Now, although different people have approached words and thought differ
ently - Voltaire said: Les hommes “n’emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées”, Johnson said: “Language is the dress of thought” - I am maintain that the essence of conference interpretation is thought analysis. To prove my point, I think one can say that it is quite possible to train a student interpreter in a monolingual mode: English into English for example.
5. Take the well-known agricultural expression: “I am not as green as I am cab
bage-looking.” Interpreted into English from English it becomes: “I am not as naive as I seem.”
6. Now, how can we “make” or train a conference interpreter? I feel that the clas
sical, Platonic definition of training, teaching or education has never been surpassed, i.e. “Educare, Ex Ducere” - to lead or bring out and enhance already innate knowl
edge, qualities and gifts. Hence, incidentally, the absolute necessity of severe selec
tion tests before admitting to a course.
7. Might I be allowed to further clarify my definition of conference interpreta
tion: “trans-cultural communication through the analysis of thoughts expressed in words”.
By the way, the late Robert Thouless, Emeritus Professor of psychology at Cambridge University, wrote: “Communication and thought are two closely related activities: they are two ways of using language. It has been said ” Man is a talking animal: when he has no-one to talk to, he talks to himself. Talking to others is what we mean by communication, talking to oneself is what we call thinking."
Section 3. Interpreting
8. I suppose there must be as many different approaches to training and teach
ing as there are cultures. My culture is basically English: I.e. empirical, pragmatic, with reasoning based on analogy. I therefore feel that, after having carefully selected the students, the best training is simply to sit them in booths and conduct practical exercises with them.
9. After all, interpreters are essentially craftsmen and women, and the best way to train them is in the workshop. But of course sitting him in front of an anvil is not enough to make a blacksmith, even if he has shown that he is very gifted.
10. In medieval France craftsmen had to do their ” tour de France", without bicycles, to learn their trade, and travel is indeed a very great educator. It therefore often amazes me that many interpreter schools do not insist on their students going abroad. How else can they become attuned to the language and culture from and into which they will have to interpret?
11. I remember as a very young interpreter once having to interpret for a Scottish Wing Commander, who spoke with a very strong accent and came out with the fol
lowing expression to describe a rather small radar station: “a one man and a dog out
fit”. I wonder how many of may no-English mother-tongue colleagues had under
stood, not to mention the delegates.
12. I have on many occasions shown French mother-tongue students in Brussels, Mons and Cambridge, the headlines of British tabloids and very rarely were they able to decode them, so unfamiliar were they of colloquial ( i.e. spoken English ) which is to be the essential tool of their putative trade.
13. I feel very strongly that students should not be allowed even to think about interpreting from and even less into a language unless they have spent a minimum of
1 year in the country or countries where that language is spoken.
14. I also tried quite unsuccessfully to test some of the same students in the trans
lation of humor and quoted a verbal caricature of Sir Geoffrey Howe which I found entertaining. Sir Geoffrey was described as “charismatically boring and accommo
datingly firm ”. None of them got the joke. Being Cartesian, they felt that you were either charismatic or boring, either accommodating or firm.
15. An in-depth familiarity with the languages and cultures to be interpreted is, therefore, the future conference interpreter’s essential pre-requisite. Such a familiar
ity is obviously required for the passive understanding of the language. However, it is also invaluable in its active use, as each language has its own specific qualities and assets. English, for example, is at its best when it is concrete and monosyllabic.
16. Poetry is the highest verbal expression of human thought and imagination.
Our greatest poet can be said to express our thought in the best fashion possible. It is, therefore, very interesting to note with John Barton that, when Shakespeare is at his most poetic, he mainly uses concrete monosyllables. John Barton quotes
Antonio’s:
Insooth, I know not why I amsosad. (10 monosyllables) Queen Margaret in Richard III:
A very prey to time (4 monosyllables, 1 polysyllable).
Emilia, his wife, to Iago:
Perchance, lago,Iwill ne’er go home (5 monosyllables, 2 polysyllables )
Michael Francis
When Shakespeare describes the passing of time, he writes: To waste huge stone with little water drops.
17. To realise how right John Barton is, one merely has to rewrite Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in abstract terms.
Instead of:
To be, or not to be, that is thequestion:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) it becomes:
Existence or its refusalis the interrogation.
Ismore intellectual satisfaction to be obtained by the endurance ofthe hazards ofmisfortune ?
or even worse - if Alexander Haig or Zbigniew Brzezinski were briefing the Pentagon:
Which is theoptimalised strategisation ? Existentialism or non-existentialism ?
Anglo-Saxon culture is able to express the most abstract notion in short sharp words. L. P. Hartley said: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."
18. Let me compare this with the only language culture with which I have any in-depth acquaintance: French. When André Citroen in vented a car whose wheels pulled it along rather than pushing it, being French he used an abstract word of Latin origin: traction as compared with propulsion. In English it becomes monosylla
ble and concrete: front-wheel drive as compared with rear wheel drive.
19. And please note that although French is usually longer and more polysyllabic than English, traction is the same syllabic length as front-wheel drive and propulsion only one syllable longer. French incidentally being a very civilised language, does not lend itself so readily to acronyms as English. FWD and RWD are both equally horrid.
20. I should like to conclude with a few words about what I call ” the complicity of technician” - much of an interpreter’s work nowadays being technical in nature.
21. Recently I had another interesting insight into the comprehension of heavily accented language in a specifically technical setting. My wife, whose mother-tongue is German, is a far better linguist than I am but she does have some difficulty, as do most us, in understanding English spoken with a heavy Liverpool accent and she knows no Gaelic whatsoever. My wife is also a very considerable expert on race
horses and we both went to the Grand National at Aintree for our Silver Wedding.
In the local near the race-course, Liverpudlian was flying thick and fast. Another race-goer gave my wife a long, heavily accented briefing on the runners in a pre
national race and said: Well, me luv, if you have a bob or two to spare, put it on Lean Ar Aghaidh (Len A.Rye).
Well, my wife put £5 on him and he romped home first at 6 to 1!! My native tongue is English but their whole conversation was Greek to me. I suppose this shows that a
Section 3. Interpreting
keen interest in the subject and an in-depth knowledge of the technical jargon can even make Liverpudlian and Gaelic understandable to a non-native speaker!
22. All this takes me back to one of the first highly technical meetings I ever interpreted in consecutive - a very daunting experience as I had been thrust into it without being able to consult vocabulary. I sat gingerly down next to a very pleasant young French engineer while the most highly technical terms were being bandied about. He must have been conscious of my discomfort and said to me “I will only ask for interpretation if I don’t understand”. The whole morning passed and he seemed quite happy even though the English spoken was with strong Texan, Scots, Germanic, Greek and Turkish accents. Then the Texan chairman said “OK Guys-lets go and have some show.” This completely foxed him as it was outside his technical vocabulary.
23. I have noticed, over the years, that the general public’s attitude to the profes
sion of conference interpreting is ambivalent. An interpreter is either viewed as being part of the furniture, a sort of linguistic tap, one turns on to get hot and cold run
ning translation or, more flatteringly, as a universal genius with an intimate knowl
edge of 35 languages and 250 minor dialects and IQ which makes Einstein seem a mental deficient.
24. At the Nuremberg trials, where simultaneous conference interpreters first hit the headlines, at least one person, Lord Justice Birkett, a British magistrate, had quite a strong opinion about my colleagues. He described them as: “Touchy, vain, unac
countable, puffed up with self-importance of the most explosive kind, inexpressibly egotistical and, as a rule, violent opponents of soap and sunlight.”
25. This is, I feel, a superb exaggeration, since essentially, as I have already said, we are craftsmen and women doing a difficult job often in difficult conditions, as the Parliament of Fowls has it: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge”.