Interpreting

Over the past two days I've been interpreting without much respite. On Friday I worked into German almost non-stop - this was not planned for, and I also would not claim to be particularly good at it - but one of the Roman Catholics from Austria had real problems following in the group work without this.

Handing out the interpretation earphones on the first day I was interested that many of the anglophones said oh no I won't need interpretation - so I made sure I said - if someone speaks in French will you need interpretation into English, that way we prevented interruptions if someone spoke French of people suddenly discovering they needed to understand. When the Austrians moved into German I interpreted into English and my colleagues whispered into French. With Arabic several colleagues interpreted consecutively into English - our clients for French had excellent Arabic so we didn't need to go intot French for them.

When Pope Benedict spoke in Regensburg last year, he gave his lecture in German, it wasn't until it was translated into English that it started to create waves.

Of course it's easier and cheaper for everyone if a meeting takes place in one language, but I wonder quite what we are doing when we insist on that, whose experience is not being heard, what assumptions do we make if we don't listen to people who may speak four or five languages but not English? If you really want your material to have an impact at the grassroots or even in discussion form somewhere it will need at some stage to be produced in other lanaguages.

Also language affects the way you think and express yourself - what do we not get if we do everything in English all the time? In terms of the meeting it was also very clear that translation and conversion have close links.

Anyway the reason there have been fewer posts these past few days is that non-stop interpreting is both time consuming and very tiring. I slept for hours yesterday afternoon. I'm also reading a new book by John le Carré called the Mission Song all about an interpreter with French, English, Swahili and a whole host of African languages. I've just got to part of the book where he's being told to pretend he doesn't understand all those other languages. the character makes the point that it's always easier to pretend you understand than to pretend you don't understand - hmm that's quite a theological point.