B Careful: Taming Your “B” Language
Transcript of video
Professor Marklen Konurbaev: Dear colleagues! Today is a wonderful day, because I’m having these two wonderful people together with me here in my interview: Chris Guichot de Fortis and Julia Poger. Both are conference interpreters, and above everything else, beautiful people. Most wonderful people! Very good friends of mine, and a couple actually. So they they've been together for how many years, Chris? Julia?
Chris Guichot de Fortis: I can't remember, I believe it's 20.
Marklen: Right. And I’m sure such marriages or such events, such histories, I think are very notable and important, because very often you share interests and views. Therefore you never know what sort of new conclusions you come to while being in the state of marriage. Therefore I think it deserves to be written down as a whole book. Therefore I think one day you should do it.
Let's imagine that this is the beginning of your great book. You start this idea, and maybe one day you will actually it will be it will be a separate book, but today we are speaking for Cosines Pi V. This is another great event. We come to the finals, and most people are expecting some very interesting talks, instructions, advice, visions, and considerations. Therefore I hope we're going to have something interesting today.
Let me begin with something that everybody knows.
“With thee conversing I forget all time;
All seasons, and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds: pleasant the sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower…”
… and so on, and so forth. But at the end, we know that “without thee” all this stuff is nothing.
Therefore today, we're going to speak about a seemingly simple, ordinary, plain thing like learning English as your “B” Language, hoping that it will be quite easy to do. Because everybody around speaks English, and therefore you think that it will be quite easy to do.
But you think that I’m wrong, I’m very wrong. Therefore now you are going to share your vision why learning, why taking English as a “B” Language for your interpreting career is not very often a very easy choice.
Chris, ladies first, therefore I would probably allow Julia to start speaking and then we will exchange opinions. Therefore I think for many people who are here listening to us on the Russian side, they will be most interested to know why English as “B” Language is such a difficult choice. Julia, what do you think about that?
Julia Poger: So, English as a “B” Language.
On the one hand, it's the only choice, if you don't have English in your combination, because everybody speaks English. And so everybody will understand you wherever you go, whatever language you're interpreting out of, if you're interpreting into English. More people will understand you than if you choose French or Spanish, or something like that. So already this is something that you really should choose. But don't rest on your laurels. Don't simply choose it and think, “okay I speak it well enough, that's fine, everybody will understand me,” because they won't.
Now I’m not talking here about high-falutin language, you know, where you understand it so beautifully that you can quote Shakespeare and say everything in a Shakespearean way, the way in Russian you could say everything in three-story “mat” [a very elaborate way of swearing in Russian] and still get the idea across.
But the problem is that you still won't be understood because of all sorts of things that you haven't thought about yet: the musicality of your language, your intonation, your stress, when you pause, when you pause even within a sentence, how you stress the important things and let the others fall, and especially and most important for me, it is definitely intonation.
Marklen: It's interesting. Intonation is actually the heart of your message. Therefore many people tend to disregard it. I’m hoping that your audience will understand you anyways, just relying entirely on your words. Chris, do you agree with that, or do you think, well, where does that importance of intonation lie actually. Why should people be very careful about that?
Chris: It lies at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of learning English. I wouldn't dream of saying Marklen that you are wrong in saying that English is a simple language to learn as a “B” Language, because I know you don't think that. I've heard you reciting The Raven [Edgar Allen Poe]. But I think it's a common misconception, because people mix up Globish and English.
It's been very much my experience with interpreters, and also with delegates in meetings, that they they can easily apprehend the Globish, which is a simple thing, it's a construct with a few hundred words, but it doesn't get the job done.
If you want to express complex ideas or ideas with sincerity, deep complicated reasoning, the English language is the tool par excellence. It is, as Shakespeare said, a precious jewel set in a silver sea. But it's easy to underestimate English, and I would put everybody on warning not to do that, not to think that English can be understood easily because everyone speaks a bit of English. It's a highly complex tool, the English language, which relies I think more than almost any other language on, as Julia said: intonation, micropauses, emphasis.
Marklen: I have a feeling that many people who are working at the mid-tier of your profession, not thinking of themselves as top professionals, they will tend to self-excuse, to find all sorts of self-excuses, meaning they will think that, “well, after all, I’m just delivering the general message and that's enough for the conversation. Everything else will come down with the writing, texts, correspondence, and so on, and so forth.”
But when we actually rise up to the level of the top conference interpreting, where all these things are important, therefore not everyone actually is thinking about that. Do you think there are any special kinds of courses, beyond what is being taught in the universities and classes on phonetics, that could be picked up by conference interpreters, the beginners, as a starting exercise? Yes Julia, what do you think about that?
Julia: Before we get to answering the actual question, I’m wondering if the people working at the mid-level who figure that they're just giving the basic message, if they're actually delivering that message? Because if they don't have the intonation, if they're not using the words correctly, if they're not stressing things correctly, if everything that they say is all at one monotone and is all running together so that there is only one long sentence so that nobody knows where the idea begins or ends – are they actually getting that message across?
Marklen: It's very important, I think, to find the right target, the right person, the right kind sample of intonation, sample of speech, that people could think of, because there are lots of speakers actually whose intonation is plain and flat and unemotional, and therefore people just think, “okay, if I speak like that, after all, people understand these people, why not me?” I could also, for example, be speaking uh well I couldn't say I couldn't speak for example all the time [mumbling]
Julia: But they understand these people who are speaking their native language flatly. And the problem here is that we're talking about people working into a “B” - they are not speaking their native language. So when they start speaking in a very flat intonation, nothing is understood. And I recall one instance when I was practicing and looking up things for my students online, and I went to a specific big conference that I knew would be interpreted, and I dug a bit and I found some Russian, and I found some English. And Chris walked in on me while I was listening to the English. He listened for a couple of sentences and said, “I have no idea what this person is saying,” because there was no intonation whatsoever. It was very flat.
Chris: It's actually worth maybe considering, those who are endeavoring to learn English to use as an interpreting language, a second language, that English actually is a very vulnerable language. Because it's easy to remove 50% of the meaning from the English language, while getting all the syntax, all the grammar, and all the words right in all the right order, but without the emphasis, without the pauses, the inflection. English depends so much on that to bear meaning.
And quite frankly, we spend a lot of time as interpreters, I’m sure all the people listening will agree with this, listening to bad English being spoken by delegates who have no choice because they're not linguists. And then, maybe, turning on to a relay which is sometimes – in my experience working from Russian, which I do not have - and then the meaning can be destroyed or capped by bad inflection, by the fact that the music of the English language, the prosody of the language, is simply lacking. And it's something I think people don't even feel they have to learn, even if they know what it actually means. But it bears a huge percentage of meaning in English.
Marklen: Now it's one thing playing with intonation and rhythm and stress when the text is familiar to you. But when the text is new, for example, and you are actually struggling with message delivery, right? At this moment you actually have no time to decorate it with beautiful intonations, right? If you take texts that you've learned previously by heart, and you can easily produce it in a very slow mode, in a very unhurried manner, knowing the hierarchy of stresses and accents and so on so forth, that's pretty easy. Therefore you say, for example, right now I might be producing a text from David Abercrombie:
“In normal friendly conversation, it is most important to avoid silence. If somebody volunteers a piece of information or some exciting news, or puts forward an opinion, or exclaims with surprise at something, an answer is just as necessary as when a question is asked.”
So I’m producing from memory at this very moment, therefore I can actually stress different words accordingly. And these texts flow more or less automatically. But when I’m struggling with message, how can I actually squeeze in the intonation?
Julia: We're both wanting to jump in on this one. No, the intonation saves you. That's what saves you. I still remember when I was starting out as a Russian interpreter. My interpretation was dire, okay, it was really bad. It was enough to be able to speak to people, and I knew that they were getting my basic message. But when things got sophisticated, I was interpreting sophisticated English - well okay, as sophisticated as one gets when one is interpreting Americans - to Russians, not at the highest levels. My delegates had me and they had another Russian interpreter who was working into their native language of Russian, but who basically didn't care, so they just reproduced what they heard. Whereas I was listening, and then I put – okay, non-native Russian intonation, very American intonation - but I emphasized what was important, and I really tried to make sure that even if I was reducing things to less gorgeous words and syntax, that I was able to use my intonation to make sure that they understood. So I was serving it to them on a silver platter, right? And I actually had delegates come up to me and say, “okay, your Russian isn't as good as your partner’s, obviously because they're natives, but I understand you better because you care.” Even though it wasn't native Russian intonation they could hear what was important because I was emphasizing it.
Chris: To see that Julia and I reacted in exactly the same way to what you were saying, I think you're being contentious on purpose, which is good. You're being devil's advocate. Of course you were. But I would say that those times when you're interpreting in the booth, when you are in difficulty and you're dealing with a speech you haven't heard before, you haven't got the text maybe… If the speaker is reading, that's when you need to major on the inflection and the music and the process, because it will carry meaning when you haven't got the time or the cerebral bandwidth to actually get the processing done. Because the meta message behind the words comes through emotion, it comes through gut feeling. And if you can espouse that gut feeling in English, and reflect what's coming from the inside with your emphasis, then you will get the job done even if you haven't got all the vocabulary.
Marklen: You know the most important thing that the beginner interpreters would be asking, where is that secret, where is that tool, where is that gadget that will help you actually master the intonation very quickly? Because very often even in my classes, “Yeah, I understand,” you say, but in your mind.
But even in the university I could spend hours and hours teaching my young interpreters actually learn the way learn to speak in a more or less English way, not to produce occasionally the Russian cadences – which are horrible actually. Therefore the most important thing that I’m doing is I’m giving them the book and asking them to read aloud. And so at least you can rely on the text and just read it out loud. And even when they read out loud I notice that they either lose the message when they try to read well, or when they try to focus on the message they lose the intonation. So they never find the balance. What would you suggest?
Shadowing
Chris: Well, first of all, the secret method which I always recommend to all those who are working on a “B” Language is to shadow. I think shadowing is something which is not used enough. Some people even decry shadowing, and say it's not a useful method. But I've had many decades experience of teaching and coaching it. It is the best way of picking up the cadence, and the emphasis, and the way in which a native speaker will speak English. For example, if we're talking about English, it is like a magic bullet.
There are many other things, and Julia used the word “caring.” Now, it may not have occurred to many interpreter trainees that to care about what you do is essential. We've all experienced delegates who manifestly don't care they are doing the strict minimum, and they're not layering meaning in their communication. But if we care about what we're doing, and if we look at the speaker and we endeavor to enter the speaker's skin, which is what I always do when the going gets tough, their voice and their inner being will automatically bring the emphasis and bring the meaning out in the way that the voice is used.
Marklen: You know, very often people think shadowing is good, but they never know the measure. Because the measure is important, right? Because if you do it, for example let's say for 20 minutes every day, they don't know whether it is enough, or not enough. It's like taking honey when you are ill. When you are ill, you need to know a bucket of honey, you need to know just one spoonful of honey – so you never know.
Julia: And how much vodka to mix with it!
With shadowing, Chris has written an entire text on this [which you can find here]. But the important thing with shadowing is to know what your goal is.
So there are several goals you can have when you shadow.
One of them is simply to reproduce pronunciation and to reproduce the words that people are using – in which case I would always suggest to shadow with the written text in front of you, partly because you can't reproduce what you didn't hear. If you don't know the grammar, you're not going to hear the grammar. You need to actually see it.
When you're shadowing, record yourself and then make sure that you actually reproduced every single sound that is written on your text.
Marklen: What you are saying is important for the beginner interpreters. But I would also add probably a very important thing very often they think that many parts of their speech will be understood by the other side easily just out of context.
Julia: Yes, but they won’t.
Marklen: They think so, and therefore therefore the tail always turns out to be to be blurred, dark, unpronounced, and so on and so forth. You know it's interesting. I’m always giving the following example in the university to my to my students. If I say something in Russian, like an old granny is asking her grandchild or grandson, how is he going to spend this evening and he says [fast, unlabialized Russian].
Did you hear the destination?
Julia: Probably the theatre, but I’m not sure exactly.
Marklen: Exactly! There's theatre, but out of theatre I pronounced probably 1% of the word. But Russian speakers are actually in the habit of catching it without any difficulty.
Julia: And English speakers can do that too. Do not even assume that you would understand me and Chris if we were speaking in our normal native way to native speakers of English. I guarantee you that none of you would understand a word Chris said, and that half of what I said would be very much slurred and incomprehensible.
But do keep in mind that when you're working into English, you're working in your “B” Language. And the fact that you think that you said it well, and that the fact that you understood what you heard doesn't mean that you actually reproducing that idea. It doesn't mean that you are reproducing that idea so it's comprehensible, but it also doesn't mean that you're pronouncing it in a way that's comprehensible to people.
My Russian “B”, if I get really tired, if I've been working many days and many hours on end, you know my lips start to feel rubbery. They do in English too, but in Russian it's worse because in English I can still make myself understood. These are sounds that my mouth is used to making, whereas with the Russian - my mouth is used to making those sounds in Russian, but it's harder when I’m more tired. And so who knows if anybody would understand me as well?
Chris: Marklen, if I might I circle back to your initial question about the shadowing?
Marklen: Yes.
Chris: Speaking about the measure, how much honey you should be consuming. I've also written a guide to the technique of training because there's a difference between trying and training. Trying gets you nowhere. Trying is like beating your head against a brick wall. Training is trying in a disciplined fashion, with an organized goal. It's very important any training that an interpreter does to have a goal and to have a structure and discipline. So I would say that short and intense is always going to be better than long and paying lip service to the training.
So I would recommend if you want to talk about nitty gritty matters, a lot more than a quarter of an hour of any sort of training for an interpreter, but frequently having a pause afterwards.
I want to come back also to something which you said about the way in which you can convey or you could take away meaning. I thought immediately of Macbeth who says,
“it is a tale
told by an idiot full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.”
and that actually now I come to think of it it's a very good description of a lot of people's English who are non-English speakers.
You'll sometimes come in and you'll start listening to a delegate speaking Globish, English as a second language – as many of our colleagues speak as well – and unless you concentrate as an English “A” you cannot understand a single word because every single word is slightly off. Nothing is diametrically opposed to the real pronunciation, but everything is slightly off. And that way you have to look at English as a delicate flower. It needs to be properly cared for and cultivated and spoken.
Marklen: You know, what you have said, what you're saying, is very important. And the length of training, and trying, and in the measure of all these things.
Reading aloud
But I’m thinking of the following things. It's easier for the English people to talk about that because from my point of view and from the point of view of many of my colleagues, the British nation is fundamentally linguistic. The Anglo-Saxon world is very linguistic in a sense that we enjoy the language, we enjoy the fluctuations, and senses, and we consider it like a sort of a honey, actually. That's what we taste, we like the music, we like the smell, we like the flavor. Therefore we like to repeat from time to time very good pronouncements that are made by this or that person, and writers. And very often we quote and produce all sorts of long speeches from memory.
Julia: That's not isolated to Anglo-Saxons - the French are very much like that as well. The Russians. I mean I still I still remember being in St Petersburg and talking to a friend in Russian, and some guy coming up to me and saying, “Читать надо!” [You need to read!]
Marklen: What I mean is the following. I think that much of the exercise could go through the advice to be more linguistic in your everyday life. Meaning, try to memorize something, try to read something out loud, try to focus on interesting expressions, try to reproduce these expressions, again and again. Like for example when you feel bad, remember Hamlet and say,
“Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,
thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!”
Right, yes or as I said in the beginning with John Milton, so
“With thee conversing I forget all time;
All seasons, and their change, all please alike.”
“When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:”
So you come up with all those quotations. They should be at the tip of your tongue. Therefore, little by little you may develop the skill of speaking beautifully, almost practically right here.
Listening
Julia: But you need to hear it to hear where the intonation comes. If you just read something and you see it… I had a Cosines class on this, in fact my very first one, on intonation. And I had people read a certain speech from Shakespeare and then I showed them what Kenneth Branagh did with the same speech. It was as night and day, because I hardly understood what people said in the room – not because they mispronounced it, but because there was no intonation behind it to tell me what to focus on, what's important, what is the next step, where is all of this going? I was just being given a laundry list of very interesting sentences that had no tie between them. Whereas if you know exactly what the message is, you can then emphasize the things that need it and de-emphasize the things that don't, just using your voice.
One of the classes that I know a former teacher at one of the, actually at two of the schools, in Paris. He would have his students get up and say, “okay you are the conference organizer, your keynote speaker is late because of - whatever - the trains are not working. Get up and make a speech explaining to everybody that they're late, but don't use words. Just use your intonation!” And so what he wanted was people to get up and say “blah blah blah” – you would have the speech in your head, but he didn't want you to use any words. He wanted to hear how your voice would modulate, to make it more natural.
Ear, Mouth and Brain
Chris: All these things that we're recommending, Marklen, about the use of English – they don't work unless they are second nature. It's like so much in interpreting: you have to create muscle memory. And that's why
it's really important to shadow, and
really important to train your ear to listen to English, and
train your mouth to speak the English, and
train your brain to process it.
When we speak, after all, what do we use to speak? We use our ears, our mouth, and our brains. And that's why extensive shadowing is important, to get your ear, your mouth, and your brain used to sending a message in English in the way it should be sent, with all the inflection, and all the subtlety the language requires.
Until you've done many tens or hundreds of hours of this, it does not become second nature, because you cannot be devoting mental bandwidth to the way in which you have to produce the language while you're interpreting. Because, as you quite rightly said, when the going gets tough, and the speech is dense, and the ideas are complex, and the vocabulary is high flown, you do not have the mental bandwidth to do that has to be second nature.
Marklen: I will make a very quick pause because I need to find the text that I want to show on the screen, just for example.
Chris what you what you said is very important, but very often people simply don't know how to stress, and don't know how to use intonation correctly.
I remember there was a situation in Moscow University, when we had a colleague from one of the universities in Great Britain who came to us. Sometime during the lecture, which was conducted by our professors, one of the postgraduate students was speaking to the class, and the British professor was giggling all the time in the front row.
Suddenly the postgraduate student was a little bit irritated with his giggling all the time, therefore he simply addressed him saying, “Am I saying anything wrong?” And he said, “Well, I’m sorry, but everything is all right,” he said, “but the most important thing is that you don't know, you stress the wrong words all the time.” That's what he said: you stress the wrong words all the time.
This means that very many people will be stressing, thinking that they're molding sense with their intonation, but in fact they will be molding the wrong sense most of the time.
Let me show you something on the screen and we could experiment probably. All right, this is a piece from David Abercrombie I was quoting today, so let me take just the first sentence. And I may be practicing the first two or three sentences with my students hoping that they will do the same thing. Maybe you will correct me. I’m saying:
“In normal friendly conversation, it is most important to avoid silence. If somebody volunteers a piece of information or some exciting news, or puts forward an opinion, or exclaims with surprise at something, an answer is just as necessary as when a question is asked.”
Correct me where I’m wrong.
Chris: You weren't.
Julia: Yes he was. Surprise. You didn't emphasize “surprise.” “Exclaims” isn't the important thing here, “surprise” is the important thing, or “exclaims with surprise at something, an answer is just as necessary as when a question is asked.”
Marklen: So do you think these things could be a very good exercise when during the class with interpreters we’ll be reading something out loud and all the time uh asking for interpretation of what is happening on the page, right?
Chris: It will be an extremely useful exercise, which I use frequently. In fact, what I've learnt myself – because obviously when you're a native speaker you don't learn the language in the same way that a foreign speaker does – I learnt myself that in English the word that takes the emphasis in a sentence is the word that conveys either the important part of that sentence or new information. By teaching the technique you've just been talking about, I've learnt myself as an anglophone that's how English works. I know it instinctively, but I didn't know how to actually express it. Now I do! So the word that bears emphasis in the sentence…
And as you know, of course, as well as anybody in English, you can have a sentence of 11 words and you can speak it 11 different ways, by emphasizing each of the words in turn, which confers 11 sorts of meaning on the same sentence. and so it's really important to instinctively grasp what is the new piece of information? What is this this sentence actually about?
Julia: And just for a very short example not an 11 word sentence but a three word sentence, “I love him.” I could say, “I love him.” I could say, “I love him.” Or I could say, “I love him!” So, you know, I love him, as opposed to Mary who may think she loves him – no, I love him! I love him, as opposed to I hate him. And I love him, as opposed to I love you.
Marklen: And I can give you one more variant. You can say, “I love ‘im.”
Julia: Yes, but you still stressed one of them.
Marklen: Yeah, absolutely! I love it!
All right, I know from my experience that very few students actually in universities are capable of of doing this very well by the end of the first or the second semester. Very often I say the balance between a nice decorative type of pronunciation and message delivery is very rarely found, actually, so students can't do that very often. After 15 or 20 minutes of talk they actually slide into their Russian intonation and think that this is all right. So it's not lasting. It means that people continue thinking in Russian, probably, or in their native tongue.
Julia: Have you noticed if, while they're doing that, if they start slipping into Russian with English words, as opposed to English with English words?
Marklen: Yes, especially when they become emotional or emphatic. For example, somebody would be saying, “Yesterday, we went to the theater. The audience was absolutely fantastic!” So this “the audience” kind of thing, this becomes very emotional. In Russian we would say, “Публика была просто очарована!” So the audience, they copy the Russian intonation in that particular case.
Chris: What we often do as interpreters, Marklen, and this is a cardinal sin that virtually all interpreters commit, is that they add their own inflection to the message, either because they don't speak the language well enough or because they misunderstood the meaning - the meta meaning – of the speaker, and then they impose their own inflection on what should be the speaker's inflection, thereby changing the message. To me it's a cardinal sin as an interpreter when you impose your personality on the message, thereby making it a different message.
Marklen: You know, I think we should probably recommend to schools of interpreting and classes of interpreting to spend more time actually teaching students to pronounce things more clearly, and work on message and intonation. Very often people think that this is a secondary matter, and think that they're wasting time trying to teach them to pronounce things clearly. But in fact, teaching students to pronounce things clearly is in fact learning the language. It is.
Julia: But that's the problem, is that so many of the interpreting schools – at least here in Europe and in the US – they feel that you should have already learned the language. You should already know how to speak it clearly, with appropriate intonation, and we are only here to teach you the skills of interpreting. So it also depends on what the goal of the school is. But then, if the teachers see that the students haven't actually learned that skill, they should take that on themselves to help them with it.
Marklen: I think we should give them some kind of a magic pill. Cosines Pi V is an event where people learn something new, and therefore it should be something very short, very succinct, very clear for our listeners; something to take home and then nurse it and probably use it, and one year later saying, “Well thank you for that magic pill! I’m completely completely reformed!”
Chris: I would agree! I think that there is an acute need for such a thing.
I'd like to refer to what Muhammad Ali said about training. He said that you have to have the will and the ability, but the will has to be stronger than the ability. And I think that’s where a lot of students fall down when they're doing interpreting, is that they don't have a sufficient burning desire to actually speak English – because they're talking about an English “B” here – correctly. If you look at the “B” Language continuum – I call it a “B” Language continuum – which stretches from just above a “C” language to just beneath an “A” language, and these are all “B” Languages.
To me, speaking as an English speaker who loves the language, and who regards English as the Ferrari of languages, I personally am mortally offended by the way in which three quarters of my colleagues who use English as a second language speak it, because they don't have the desire. They think that mediocre is good enough. I think if we can insufflate the desire into students to actually shine and fly high, that would be the first factor.
Pareto Principle
Julia: The problem, Marklen, is the Pareto principle, 80% and 20%, right? 80% of your results comes from 20% of your work, but then the last 20% of your results comes from 80% of your work. So everybody's willing to get to the 80% of making their language 80% good and not 100% good, because it doesn't take so much effort. But that last 20% will kill you, and that's the part that you need the will to want to overcome.
Marklen: You know, that's right, but that's a very general principle and people want to want to have some sort of a real exercise that would help them overcome that.
I have an idea that you will either decline or accept. I think that many people who are learning a foreign language for their interpreting job in the future, they're focusing too much on the technical side of that. Too much they think of the lack of a foreign language like a set of semantic items linked to each other in some sort of a grammatical way. Therefore, for many people, learning a foreign language is like learning a machine code. You learn items, items, items, items, and then you learn how to sew these items together, hoping that this will deliver the message.
From my point of view, it doesn't work at all. It doesn't work like that because very often people say something quite unexpectedly. Like, for example, I was working for the correspondent of the Economist for many years, and he was very British in dealing with me. Because although I was his research assistant and actually his secretary, like an office assistant, very often he would enter the office and ask me to organize an interview with somebody. But this request was very special. He was very British at that moment.
For example, what would you expect a Russian person, a Russian boss, saying to his secretary, if he wants to organize an interview, saying, “Так, Оля, нужно организовать встречу, интервью, с премьер-министром. Так что, давай! До конца дня. чтобы всё было сделано!” [Olya, I need an interview with the Prime Minister. Organize it before the end of the day!]
But you can never render it like that in English. That's impossible! And my boss at that time who was an English gentleman, at that time his request sounded approximate saying, “Marklen, why don't you organize an interview with the Prime Minister, probably at the end of the week, that would be very very good. I would be most grateful to you.”
What's that? Is it an order or a request? Well, this an order, and you should perceive it as an order. Therefore, when we are speaking of intonation, accent, and stresses, I say don't just learn the language, learn the culture, because when you start learning the culture, it will be meaning equivalence across cultures.
Culture
Chris: Right, I entirely agree with you. I think it's a field which is very much neglected in interpreter training. People will put forward the language combination with languages which they say they speak, and they may – as you say – technically be able to stitch words together in a grammatical fashion, but they have no idea what culture lies behind those words. Because the way we speak our language expresses how we see the world, and how we see the world derives from our culture, which is why the best interpreting schools demand that you spend time in that in the country of your second language – and they're quite right! For example, when you spoke about your boss there, was he an English gentleman or was he an English gentleman?
Marklen: He was an English gentleman.
Chris: Right, exactly! It sounds like he was both, actually. There we have a fine nuance of accentuation in English which changes the meaning, which of course you caught but a lot of interpreters do not catch it.
Marklen: Yeah, so therefore I think probably it would be a waste of time to focus just on intonation classes in that particular case. You wouldn't achieve the desired effect.
Chris: You need to pair intonation with meaning, i.e.,
What is the speaker getting at?
Why is the speaker taking the floor?
What is the speaker's point?
How is he trying to make his point?
How is he using the language to serve that point?
And they have to be stitched together.
Julia: The problem is that you know how to tell a story in your own language. You know how to emphasize what's important. You know how to ratchet up the tension, or make everybody calmer, just by using your intonation in your native language.
And if you were to ask any of your interpreting students to tell a story in their native language, tell a fairy tale you know in your native language, they can do it. They can make all the sounds, and the intonation, and so on. Whereas if you ask them to do it in a foreign language, it's almost impossible – especially at the beginning. So they need to learn how to tell that story in a way that a native speaker would tell it, and not in the way that they would tell it.
Marklen: You know, my university professor had a very funny habit. Very often I would come to her - she was an oldish lady, actually, and therefore from time to time she would just say, “Marklen, sorry, could you speak up? I can't hear you.” Although I was trying hard actually to make myself understandable, she would ask me again and again.
And then one of my colleagues at the English Department in Moscow University said to me, “Marklen, you should really try hard to speak up. I said, “Mikhail Vladimirovich, why so?” “I will tell you a secret. The old lady always has cotton buds in her ears, and that's her secret.” She does it on purpose, because she wants to be authentic. Therefore if she can't hear that meaning, she doesn't want to pretend she doesn't hear. She really created a situation when she can't hear.
Therefore I would recommend to university teachers and interpreting coaches to put cotton buds into their ears, hoping that this will improve the whole teaching situation.
Voice Projection
Chris: Nice trick, actually. This is a slightly different field, of course, because voice projection and voice management is a whole different kettle of fish, which is also essential for interpretation. And it's also a part of the communication.
I have to admit that every single year, I teach second year Masters students in Belgium, among others, and every single year when they start to speak and start to do their consecutive interpretation, I can't hear a single one of them. “For God's sake, speak up! I can't actually hear you, and if you can't be heard you can't be an interpreter. You might as well stay home!” So the whole voice projection thing is a whole extra chapter which interpreters have to take on board.
Julia: But this has absolutely nothing to do with our “B” Language talk.
Marklen: A “B” Language seems to be very easy to pick up, but in fact it is not so easy to pick up. And it doesn't matter which language you learn, whichever language you learn. You always you think that if you've learned and mastered 2500 words and know how to manipulate them easily, it's not learning the language. It's just learning to manipulate 2000 words, That's all. You can't deliver messages.
Therefore, from my point of view, you're quite right in focusing our attention on the importance of learning really, in good earnest, what you consider to be your “B” Language.
Market Pressure
Chris: Marklen, it's also a product – I mean obviously you're Russian, and you're speaking from Russia, and very much with an eye to the Russian audience, and Cosines Pi – I think that in Russia, given that you virtually have to have an English “B“ Language or you can't earn your living as an interpreter. I mean, I’m not sure I know a single Russian interpreter who hasn't got an English “B“ or says he or she hasn't got an English “B”…
Julia: Because they wouldn't have English!
Chris: Probably true.
On the other hand, I think it's also a product for the market, because the market pushes us and forces us these days to have a “B”, and primarily an English “B”. And therefore I think market pressure is such that people may put themselves forward as being able to work back into English when they're not really ready to do so.
Julia: One of the things that Chris isn't necessarily aware of on the Russian market, is that Russian interpreters when they go to school have two foreign languages, and both of them are their “B”. So they're working on two foreign languages as their “B”s when, quite frankly, again the Pareto Principle means they're never going to get beyond the 80% if they don't really focus enough on that extra 20% to make their language really comprehensible.
And so the ones who are at the highest levels have spent the extra hours and hours and hours on at least one of their languages to make sure that it's at that level before they then spend the hours on the second one. Whereas the people who are still in school are just trying to pass their exams, and so they're just trying to bring both of the languages up at the same level to just be able to pass and, hopefully, to pass one of them well.
Marklen: Now what you're saying, Julia, is very important. And I hope this this very short conversation between ourselves right now will set the ball rolling for many teachers, and universities, and for many coaches of interpreting, and in colleges, to start thinking about the importance of these matters more seriously.
But I think we gave some instructions and pieces of advice to our to our audience today, but I think I have one more, but will be the very last because we're coming to the end. I think you can learn things either technically or in a human way. I think the human way of learning things is the following.
You know I love that picture that you showed me in the beginning of our talk. I will ask you to reproduce this picture once again, but one more moment.
Dear colleagues, dear audience, we're coming to the end of our conversation, and we hope there will be a feedback, there will be a lot of questions and commentary. This talk is going to be published on the Cosines Pi website and also in all the social networks.
Summing Up
The most important thing is I would say by way of summing up,
- the first thing, is shadowing,
- then combining reading and message delivery,
- maybe learning things by heart from time to time,
- reading out loud,
- spending more time on the study of culture, and
- listening to what people are saying.
But most importantly is you can be a good interpreter if you are human.
There is a very majestic way of sense delivery, by when you are putting your head to the head of some other person [Chris and Julia lean towards each other and touch heads], and this is the right way of learning things, because this love creates the best instrument for language sharing, meaning sharing, message sharing. That's the most important instrument that I could think of.
Chris: And of course Marklen, and the good side of that, the big plus point is that if you love something and you devote yourself to it heart and soul, it becomes easy, and it becomes fun.
Marklen: Thank you! I think this is a very good slogan at the very end:
“It becomes easy and it becomes fun!”
Let's stop here, because I think we've said enough for our audience to draw certain conclusions.
Chris Guichot de Fortis and Julia Poger, our speakers today. This was a very interesting talk, and I hope you would be able to come here one day to Cosines Pi VI, which is going to take place at the end of September. Therefore let's hope we shall not be locked down at the end of September. It's going to be pretty quick, because we are opening the doors right now to the next competition. Therefore, we'll be prepared for that.
Thank you!
For a full definition of “A”, “B” and “C” languages, please see here.
