Seven-Year Itch of A Court Interpreter

When it comes to being reflective upon what has happened over a lengthy period of time, Chinese people like to start with “time flies”, probably because this English expression is perfectly similar to its Chinese counterpart. In other words, literal translation.

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Time flies.

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It was seven years ago that I stepped into the courtroom as an interpreter for the first time and that?intimidating memory of uttering the two highly unfamiliar and uncommon words, “Your Honour”, in a voice barely short of trembling, remains fresh. The past seven years has been an adventurous road paved with linguistic puzzles, semantic challenges, phonetic conflicts, pragmatic tricks, grammatical traps, syntactic complexities and cultural differences every step of the way. Perhaps it is time to scratch the 7-year itch and rekindle the linguistic romance.

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To be fair, 7-year itch is a misnomer in my world of interpretation. It is 7 years’?itches, as briefly complained about hereinafter. Despite my desire to sound erudite, these are all conclusions or discoveries made on the basis of first-hand experience, not founded on solid academic research.

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1.?Grammar: rule of grammar or rule of grandma

1)?Rule of grammar

The English language is inflexible in the sense of having embraced and being subject to a thorough and well-developed set of grammatical rules. These rules work effectively to produce a stable and predictable language. Each and every single word in a sentence can be properly explained and justified. For instance, in the sentence “have you eaten your fish”, every word plays a role that is indispensable to forming the meaning.

2)?Rule of grandma

Compared with English, the Chinese language is like a caring and understanding grandma, always ready and willing to forgive mistakes. A subject is left out? No problem. A?sentence does not need a subject. The time of an action is unclear due to a lack of tenses? Not a problem. It is for the listener to figure it out. Causality is lost? Never mind. It’s more often than not implied. For instance, to ask “have you eaten your fish”, Chinese speakers may say “鱼吃了”?(kind of like “fish eat/eaten”). In this example, there is no need to indicate a subject or use the tense. Causality, subject, and sequence of action are all implied.

These differences result in?or, conversely, result from?what is known as parataxis in Chinese and hypotaxis in English, or implicit cohesion and explicit coherence. Chinese is grammatically flexible and its interpretation depends heavily on the context, while English is more strict, leaving relatively less leeway for interpretation, which means to properly interpret from Chinese into English involves making the hard choice among multiple possibilities. I?was often approached by people asking what a particular phrase or word means and as ready as I am to prove or at least pretend I am linguistically knowledgeable, the honest answer remains “It depends”.

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2.?Vocabulary: One man’s meat is another man’s pork

The Chinese lacks a single word for “pork”?and has to combine “pig”?with “meat”. On?the?same note, “ox meat”?for “beef”, “little/young cow meat”?for “veal”... The use of characters means it is difficult to create new characters and successfully introduce them into everyday use. Imagine the time it takes to put all the strokes together to form a character , add it to the huge number of characters already in common use, and make it recognizable and acceptable to everybody, and it will be a reasonable conclusion that successfully creating new characters will most likely be an effort in frustration or at least an uphill battle, which means the use of characters restricts the Chinese language in its ability to coin words. For the relatively limited number of characters to depict this ever-evolving and ever-expanding world, whenever a new concept is created in or introduced into the language, more often than not the new concept is semantically assigned an existing word/character in Chinese, which means a large percentage of what are considered synonyms in English correspond to one single word/character in Chinese. For instance, instead of coining a new word to mean “alligator”, the Chinese language uses a word to the effect of “short-snouted crocodile”.

The English language in comparison has an almost unlimited supply of words, thanks to that magic set of 26 symbols. New words can be easily coined or readily borrowed from other alphabetic languages, and admittedly, English being a word-friendly language is constantly on a mission to coin new words, for a variety of reasons, including perhaps a motivation to make access harder by the use of jargon.

The Chinese vocabulary is like a stationary lake, drawing on its existing pool to feed the world. The English vocabulary is like a confluence of rivers, streams, and brooks, always evolving, expanding and gaining momentum. Thanks to these huge differences, to pick the right word in English can a big headache for a Chinese learner.

Example: “I want to change a new lock”

The sentence “I want to change a new lock”?is a seemingly "literal", but incorrect, translation of the Chinese source, for the simple reason that the word “change”?is only a partial equivalent of the Chinese word “换”, which means “change”, “change...for”, “replace”, or “substitute”, among others. Actually, for a perfect equivalent to be missing in English-Chinese translation is the norm, not the exception.

In other words, the concept “word-for-word translation”?is, to put it mildly, a linguistic myth that deserves to be debunked thoroughly and once and for all as of September 7, 2021.

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3.?Translationese: Beauty vs. Loyalty

One of the topics discussed in an academic program of translation is the criteria for assessing a translation. It doesn’t take an extensive amount of experience to appreciate that, when it comes to translation, beautiful and idiomatic language may not be the most faithful translation, while excessive linguistic loyalty tends to produce an awkward and unnatural text or speech, aka translationese. It is the gap between two languages that produces the translationese. The bigger the gap, the harder it is to completely avoid translationese.

In interpretation, to summarize and explain roughly what has been said is like the low-hanging fruit, not the hardest to obtain. To achieve beauty and loyalty at the same time, on the other hand, is a high-hanging fruit that rarely grows on the tree, is oftentimes out of reach,?and sometimes hangs on the moon.

4. The myth of “beautiful translation”

It is not the rare case that a translator would be questioned for producing a translation that is "not beautiful”, which is to say the least a comment based entirely on ignorance. The purpose of translation is to reproduce a near-perfect equivalent of the source text and that of interpretation is to deliver a speech that effectively gets the message across. If a translator is competent, whether the translation is beautiful or not depends entirely on the source text and speech. If someone hesitates, is evasive, or uses a lot of slang, the interpreter makes the efforts to reproduce that hesitation, evasiveness or informal language. We do not polish the language.

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5.?The?myth of “fluency”

To assess an individual’s command of the language, “fluency”?can be a common but particularly misleading criterion. A 10-year-old kid speaks the mother tongue fluently, but that fluency is LIMITED to the small world typical of a 10-year-old kid. As the kid grows up, gets educated, and accumulates life experience, he or she is exposed to an increasingly bigger world, where that “fluency”?gradually evolves and applies?to an ever-expanding world as well. Actually, this world has never seen and will probably never see full fluency in or full command of any language by any individual. We all speak only PART of the language, typically 1% to 5%. If human behaviour is divided into physical and mental activities, the latter is exclusively and entirely language-based. Any knowledge in any speciality, major, discipline, profession?or industry, is essentially language in disguise. In other words, can we, or can we not, think without language?

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6. The myth of “dialect”

I used to think of Cantonese and all the other languages spoken in south China as “dialects”, until I experienced that aha moment and realized Chinese is a macro-language and Mandarin Chinese is technically the official language. One of the reasons these languages are mistaken as “dialects”?is the same writing system being used. In other words, a word can be pronounced differently in different Chinese “dialects”?but written the same way. For instance, the Chinese word “吃饭 (eat)”, in Chinese Pinyin or spelling sound, is “Chi Fan”, while if we use Pinyin?to Romanize?the same word in another Chinese dialect, it may be “Qi Fan”. This means the Chinese is a macrolanguage and the so-called dialects in Chinese are essentially languages that are similar to each other. In the 1950’s, when Mandarin Chinese was yet to be promoted all over China as the only official language, government officials from north China, in their initial contact with their Cantonese counterparts, had to resort to written communication while physically being in the same room. In this job, court interpreters often cross paths with people from various regions of China, where the word in one region might have a different meaning in another. For instance, “wife”?in some region of south China might mean “daughter-in-law”?in northeast China, and to “chitchat”?has at least a few versions in different regions of China, namely 侃大山(Kan Da Shan) in Beijing, 摆龙门阵 (Bai Long Men Zhen) in Sichuan province, or 唠嗑 (Lao Ke) in northeast China, among others.

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7. The myth of “accent”

I used to worship “London”?or “New York”?pronunction and consider all the other pronunciation as accents and made futile efforts to mimic BBC and VOA by listening to a radio whose signal was frequently interrupted, effectively confusing myself until I came to the hard realization that “accent”?is, like many other concepts in linguistics, relative. A majority of the younger generation from south China are speaking Mandarin Chinese nowadays as their first language and losing the “dialect”, which by the way is a tremendous cultural loss, and these young people speak Mandarin in a way that is distinctive from someone in north China, where Mandarin Chinese originates. The question is: if these people are perceived to speak their first language with an “accent”, is that a reasonable label??Likewise, to a pair of ears in Halifax, Torontonians might have an accent. Working as a court interpreter means being exposed to different accents, and when it comes to comprehending different accents, the shortcut is nonexistent.

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8.?The myth of “language being a tool”

I?used to be in the “language-being-a-tool”?camp for years. Working as an interpreter has slowly and irreversibly converted me. Undeniably, language does appear to be a tool, but that is an overly superficial and narrow definition. Language is to me “the collection of ALL the information that was, is and will be known to humankind”?(my less-than-strict definition). No complex thought exists independent of language. In other words, language is thought in disguise. One thought-provoking question may be whether thought precedes language.?I wish to sound knowledgeable and provide a definitive answer, but all I can say for now is: in the absence of a complex language, complex thought is impossible. Birds make a sound when they panic. That sound is a form of language, just a simple language, not complex enough to support complex thought. Any amount of efforts to teach an animal to speak a human language would be?utterly?in vain, as it is essentially trying to teach the animal to think like a human being. There was a study where researchers found that smart people tend to have a bigger vocabulary. Smart not in the sense of being “intelligent”, but in the sense of being more knowledgeable as a result of this bigger vocabulary (a better command of the language). In other words, the big vocabulary affords these people the knowledge and information to be “smart”?and think in ways, fields, realms, aspects and perspectives that would be otherwise inaccessible. In conclusion, the boundary of a language is the boundary of our active thinking. The purpose of any and all forms of education, is to push that boundary.

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9.?Interpreter’s split personality

Let me scratch by?citing?two heavily debated linguistic theories: linguistic determinism (that the language literally determines the way a person thinks) and linguistic relativity (that the way we think is relative to or influenced by the language we speak). I lack enough knowledge to draw a well-founded conclusion on the former but working as an interpreter has turned me into a firm believer in the latter. A?large number of the cross-cultural differences I have observed in this job stem from two language-specific and different perspectives. When you switch the language, you subconsciously switch the perspective, which has been attested to more than once in my conversations with interpreter colleagues. In this sense, bilingualism may be a trigger of split personality, in a positive way. For instance, researches have shown speakers of Spanish tend to be happier as Spanish is a “happy”?language, with its large number of positive words. Next time you need a booster, perhaps you want to try “Hola amigo”.

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10.?“Trying”?circumstances

One of the key tasks of a court interpreter is to help a witness testify in a trial. Under such “trying” circumstances, one can predict a rigorous examination of all the words interpreted into evidence.?People are not in court to exchange pleasantries. Nobody’s role is a formality.?Any linguistic bells and whistles, such as subtlety, nuance, ambiguity, evasiveness, sarcasm, innuendo, to name a few, are waiting to be communicated through the interpreter. To pull that off, a?combination of a?high level of attentiveness, an inquisitive nature, an expert command of both languages, and an in-depth understanding of both cultures is the necessary but not sufficient condition. Such a seemingly inconvenient combination of skills will still not suffice, as proper interpretation takes probably a still bigger toolset. In a drug trafficking case, you need to search in the semantic bank for the chemical equivalent of that narcotic. In an impaired driving case, some knowledge about statistics (in BOTH languages) may come in handy when an expert witness talks about the metabolism of alcohol in the system. In potentially any case, your brain needs to be racked, in a split second, to come up with a proper solution for that joke containing a pun that lacks an equivalent in the target language or a reference that you may not have heard of, despite the wishful and unknowing expectation that “an interpreter is to know everything”. A few weeks ago, I was on this assignment where the word “peremptory”?was used to insist on some action by a party and somebody cracked a joke by saying “you say peremptory. I say ‘double secret probation’”. Please allow me to conceal my secret of effectively interpreting that expression, but I can say for sure it is not a "word-for-word" translation of “double + secret + probation”.

In the house of interpretation, challenge is and will always be the permanent tenant for whom no eviction order can be effectively enforced.

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11.?Linguistically parallel universe

What gets lost in translation is not just poetry. What exists in one language may not always be detectable in another, no matter how skilled an interpreter can be. Communication through interpretation in some cases scratches only the semantic surface and in others presents a linguistic reality that tends to be easily misinterpreted by the target audience. We are all the victims of our limited and subjective (linguistic) experience. Given the itches that have been discussed above, it is not difficult to get a sense, if not come to the conclusion, that experience in one language may be vastly different from that in another.?Here are two more examples to further elaborate on the itches I can’t wait to scratch:

1)?Person A has set up a computer. Person B passes by and nearly trips on the cable. Person A immediately asks Person B to be “careful”. To the ears of a Mandarin speaker, that “careful”?may be interpreted to mean: I’m so sorry. Are you OK? Please be careful. I care about you and don’t want you to trip on the cable... To an English speaker, that “careful”?might have an unintended meaning and be interpreted quite differently. So, can speakers of the two languages be “careful”?in the same way?

2)?I was working on a project with a group of “native English speakers”, the definition of which by the way is a tricky one. One day a colleague asked me: “are you ready to roll?”?My Mandarin personality kicked into gear and it took a while for me to realize what he meant. In Mandarin, “to roll”?is a somewhat nastier version of “get out of here”?or “beat it”. So, to what extent do two cultures really understand each other, if we roll so differently?

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Seven years’?itches have been eye-opening, satisfying, and rewarding. As the saying goes, whatever itches you only makes you itch for more.

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Gracias amigo.

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