Interpreting

Anyone who grows up in a bilingual environment is an interpreter by default. A menu detail here, a phone call there, it’s something I’ve been doing all my life.

But when I began to interpret professionally I realized that, just as knowing how to cook doesn’t make one a chef, knowing another language doesn’t make one an interpreter. Or a translator. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that. Here’s a quote from a story I wrote after a conference in Albuquerque:

“A conference will of course have an overall theme, but each individual session can be on almost any topic imaginable. You might start off in a workshop discussing criteria for reciprocal acceptance of academic credentials, for example, and then go straight into a lecture on the legal rights of low-income minorities in border regions. After lunch there could be a presentation on children with asthma, followed by an interactive session on non-governmental organizations. All of which is interpreted simultaneously from one language to another—and sometimes in both directions at once.”

As in so many fields, a professional touch and a measure of sensitivity born of experience can make all the difference. Words and meanings are fragile, and experts are needed to transfer them correctly from one mind to another.