ETHICS 1

Some of you may know I belong to two professional areas: performing arts and languages. We dancers are supposed to be the dumbest among the dumb. We are not. On the contrary, we are quite smart and we have really helpful life skills other professions lack. It is true that we are tough, both on ourselves and on each other but our ethics are solid.

If anything, the last two years have made me take a stronger stand on ethics, and believe me, they were pretty strong already.

We always talk about how there are a lot of untrained and unqualified people who work as translators and interpreters, and we all go “corporative” and proud, and rant about our training and all the money and time we have invested.

OK. Let’s see. This is something I see in my other profession, dance. When I was young, any good-looking girl would be hired by a TV station as a dancer just because they were pretty, in the very same way that people who speak two or more languages are hired as translators and interpreters. I am a qualified and certified dance teacher and I it pains me to see how many untrained dancers are giving lessons: they lack basic teaching and pedagogy knowledge and they can also injure their students just because they don’t know about child development or advanced anatomy. It’s the same in T&I: I am a translator/ interpreter and therefore I can teach (T&I or languages). Really? 

Teaching T&I is much more than knowing how to do what you do. You need to know why you do it.  You need to be didactic and you need to know how to teach. You need to know Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Cognition, Pedagogy and Psychology among other things. Additionally, you need to like it; if you don’t, it shows. And that, just like it is with people, is a two-way street, if you don’t like teaching, then teaching is not going to like you (and neither will your students). If you think teaching is standing there in front of your students bragging about your professional and personal achievements, again, you are wrong.

Then, my question is: is it ethical to become an untrained and unqualified teacher simply because you are a translator and interpreter? 

*"Ethical" almond milk matcha latte

Experience or training?

In my Research and T&I as a Profession courses this question has come up a few times. 

As I see it, on the one hand, we can have very highly qualified graduates from respected academic institutions that have no experience despite their “practical training” in class. I am not saying that that training is negative or does not count. Unfortunately, no matter how much you try to reproduce real world conditions, it is not going to be the real thing for one main reason: you are in a classroom for educational/ training purposes, and you are going to be assessed accordingly, not by real world standards.

On the other hand, we have highly experienced professionals that had little or no training in the field, maybe because it was not available at their time, that are also excellent at their job.

And then, we have a wide variety of combinations of both in between these two extremes.

There are academic papers that make a robust defence of training as well as others defending experience. I will not cite any of them, but in most cases, there is a problem with the amount of quantitative or qualitative data, and sometimes even both. Sometimes they are plainly biased. My point of view is that you need a combination of both, but you cannot rule out anyone for lacking training if they are well experienced or experience if the have a solid training. 

However, I have been hearing from many people that experience is not important at all. They argue that having a degree of training will not only compensate for but, have more weight than having experience. 

Please excuse me: if you are going to tell me that my almost twenty years in the field (yes I’m old) account for nothing, I am sorry to tell you that you are wrong. We, people with experience (and also training,) know the ropes of the trade precisely because of our experience, and that is something no diploma or certificate can provide. It is something that comes with time and, of course, experience.

Of course, training is important, but it is not enough on its own.

I am not going to say there is a right amount of training or experience to make the perfect professional if there is such a thing. In my opinion, there are different optimal combinations for various positions, and we all need to find our niche. We are all different, and that is good.

So, what’s your take: experience or training? Both?

New post on The Rolling Translator: Mentoring, anyone?
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New post in The Rolling Translator. What's your take on MT? Here's mine. http://therollingtranslator.blogspot.com

Networking

Despite having been a freelance translator and interpreter for more than fifteen years, I have never been a fan of networking. In fact, I did not see the point: I did my work, be it at home or the clients' premises and it was enough for me, I was happy with my little pool of clients.

Regardless, I took a course on Marketing for Translators, little did I know the instructor would become my boss some years later (best boss ever, by the way). The course proved valuable however it focused on marketing.

At one of the ATA's conferences I attended a speed networking session and I cannot say I liked it… I guess by now you already know I am not the social type.

However, MIIS has changed my point of view on networking. And not only thanks to our amazing career adviser but also thanks to two of my classmates who happen to have powerful networking and public speaking skills.

Lucy Jobe http://sites.miis.edu/ljobe/ is my personal social media guru. Thanks to her I got reacquainted with Twitter. In one of her speeches, she provided easy and helpful tips to maximize our use of this network with almost little effort. She has also created the MIIS MegaSec Twitter account to promote awareness about our consecutive interpretation practice sessions. For more info about Lucy https://twitter.com/lucielle_j and https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucyjobe. MIIS MegaSec https://twitter.com/MIIS_megasec.

When it comes to personal networking, Eréndira Sáez is my hero. She attends countless events and does not miss any opportunity to talk to new people and even recommend some friends for jobs! She does have a gift for socializing and networking, but she also believes in the usefulness of the later. She is right, a good part of all the good things MIIS can provide for us is the contacts. And not only for us, ultra stressed out MIIS students, but for anyone. For more information about Eréndira https://www.linkedin.com/in/erendirasaenz and https://twitter.com/ErendiraS.

Our world is increasingly becoming more and more cooperative, and translators and interpreters are not isolated anymore. As an almost pathologically shy person, I find it pretty awkward to start talking to just anyone, however, once the first twenty seconds are over, the conversation gets smoother. Current times require us to be good communicators and salespeople. At first, I thought that having a well rehearsed "elevator speech" was not for me and a waste of my time. I couldn't have been more wrong. Having a "basic shot speech" about yourself will come handy in many different situations, and as you never know where your next opportunity will come from, I would encourage everybody to have one.

To CAT or not to CAT

Are you one of those interpreters who thought they were safe from CAT tools and alike? If you are, you can start thinking about changing careers: CAT tools are here to stay and they will conquer the interpretation world too.

I must admit I was no fan of CAT tools in the beginning (and I am talking about way back in the days), but now Word Fast is one of my best friends and as I started to wonder what could be done to make our lives easier in the booth, or when doing consecutive interpretation, I came across some interesting applications of technology for us, interpreters.

Remote interpreting is already an evidence of how useful technology can be for us and for our clients because it allows for more privacy for medical interpretation and saves time and money due to the fact that the interpreter dos not need to be on site.

Fortunately, the days where a machine will be able to take our jobs from us are very far, however some technological advances can make us much faster and accurate when working. For example, the Smartpen allows interpreters to perform in a hybrid mode: they can read their notes while listening to the speech, which dramatically increases accuracy and is very useful for court settings, for example.

As for the booth, it would be very convenient to have an app in our tablets that is able to transcribe speech and allows us to tap in a certain word to provide equivalents in the target language. That would be very useful and it is a real possibility thanks to décalage.

However, right now we do have some interesting tools and apps that help us train better such as Voice-o-meter that helps us train the perfect voice volume and modulation; Vbookz pdf voice reader can be used to play articles and books and do interpreting practice, as it is possible to regulate the speed; with Interplex lite users can access Interplex glossary databases on an iPhone or iPod Touch; and Listening drill allows users to import TED talks, audio books, MP3 files, and other file formats and use them for foreign language practice.

Technology is here to stay and we may as well take advantage of it.

References

Silva, Cris

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tools-technology-interpreters-cris-silva-m-a-ct-ahi

Drechsel, Alexander

http://aiic.net/page/6624/interpreters-versus-technology-reflections-on-a-difficult-relationship-part-1/lang/1

Orlando, Marc

http://aiic.net/page/6484/interpreting-training-and-digital-pen-technology/lang/1

Welcome!

Welcome to a new space that aims to provide some food for thought for translators and interpreters. Are you a geeky translator? Are you afraid of technology? Are you an interpreter who hates translation? Are you both a translator and interpreter? Do you have a Z language? Whatever your case, you’ll be welcome here.

After 17 years as a freelancer, becoming a MIIS student has changed some of my opinions and positions about the profession and the business.

Let’s roll!