The Taming of the Mic

Transcript of the video.

Interview with Chris by Alex Shein and Dmitry Buzadzhi of Perevod Zhiv (Translation Lives), published Mar 4 2021

Thomas (codriver):  dix – neuf – sept – six – cinq – quatre – trois …

Chris:  Enjoy

Sam (codriver):  Yes, likewise.

Thomas:  Et c’est parti!  (Rally notes, rally car engine)

Chris:  We interpret because it gives us a rush.

Alex:  Hi and welcome to Translation Lives, a YouTube channel about interpreting and translation.   Today we talked to Chris Guichot de Fortis, a professional interpreter working at one of the international organizations in Brussels, a trainer, and a man of many hobbies.

Thank you for joining us.  Could you tell us about the first steps in your career?  Was it a gradual induction or baptism by fire, with a lot of stress?  And what helped you to survive and grow professionally?

First steps as an interpreter

Chris:  I went straight from my interpreting school to the international organization in Brussels where I became a staff interpreter from the very first day, and it was sink or swim.  I mean the level was very high.  It was extremely demanding, and I moved from school straight into that very highly professional universe.  And it was very difficult to start with.  

Do you recall, did you ever see the film called “Rush” about Niki Lauda and James Hunt in formula one, it showed this rivalry in the seventies between these top formula one drivers.  You may know that I also do rally driving, so that is a big component of my stress recipe.  And in the film you see James Hunt, who was this brilliant driver.  Every time before a race he would vomit.  He'd be standing there, outside of his car, he'd be sick, then he'd get in the car and win the race.  And in some ways that was both a physiological reaction to the stress, and also part of his preparation.  It became like a mantra for him, because we all need these procedures whereby we get ready to perform at a high level, and that was one of his.  I think originally it was unconscious, and it became part of his preparation.

Strangely enough, now, when I arrived at my employer in Brussels immediately after leaving school, I would be sick every day for about six months.  Obviously I didn't do it in the booth - I went to hide in the toilets  - but because I was so stressed, because it was a high stress environment.  So I moved really from the school, which was like a kindergarten, that's interpreting with no stress present, to suddenly being up here in the stratosphere of stress, where the demands were extremely high, the delegates were very, very demanding, the technical level was very difficult to master.  

And so I didn't learn it immediately.  No, it took me - I don't know how long it took me - it probably took me a couple of years working as a staff interpreter, day in day out.  So this means 150 - 200 days a year before I began to get a handle on the stress.  And I began to get a handle. 

Teaching students to deal with stress

And it was because of that, because of the hell  I’ve been through for the first couple of years that I wanted to avoid this for my students and for up-and-coming generations of interpreters.  

And every time I had a generation of students, I always saw them, nine out of ten of them, fall flat on their face when it came to exams, when it came to tests, when it came to working at a high level, because they were stressed and they lost between, I don't know, 20 and 50% of their resources which they'd studied really hard to acquire, under the effects of the stress.  

So if you think about it, you have to do one of two things:  you either have to be so good that even if you lose 30 percent say of your ability under stress you're still good enough, or you have to fight the stress, which means that you can perform closer to your best ability all the time.  And something I always try and train my students to do, who are young interpreters doing their master's degrees, is not necessarily to get better on their best day, but to find a way to be consistently closer to their best so their performance is not going up and down, up and down, but it's remaining more or less constant, as of course has to happen with professionals, because failing, drying up in the booth, or running out of the booth screaming is not an option when you're a professional interpreter.  

So I suppose if I were to try and summarize my five hours of stress lecture in 30 seconds, it would be a mixture of physical and psychological measures:  physical, being comfortable in the booth, doing breathing exercises, maybe sophology, maybe meditation, maybe prayer.  A series of methods enabling you to not give in to the stress.  

Another way which I often recommend students or young interpreters work is to have micro-pauses.  Now you may or may not recall, you're probably too young for this, back in the late 70s I was a tennis player.  At one time I was a professional tennis player, and a lot of the stress-relieving techniques which are used by professional athletes I find are extremely useful for interpreters.  Because basically, simultaneous interpreting is like the Olympic Games for your brain.

Anyway, there was a time when Arthur Ashe, the American, was playing Jimmy Connors in the final in Wimbledon.  And Jimmy Connors in fact was the probably the best player of his time.  Arthur Ashe was the pretender, and no one really expected him to reach the finals at Wimbledon - and he actually won, and the way he won was by working in micro-meditations.  So in between points and in between changing ends, for a few seconds, he would close his eyes, close everything else out, and just be there in his core and and recover psychologically.  And he'd do this all the time.  And I find that in interpreting we have gaps and pauses of 5, 10, 15 seconds regularly.  And it can even happen with a slow speaker in between phrases sometimes.  Close your eyes and the whole point is to be able to de-stress yourself, 100%, not 70 not 60, just evacuate everything and nothing else exists other than your inner core.  That's like a physical way of recovering rapidly.

I put together a whole series of tricks and methods to combat the stress and to use the stress, because combating it is not enough.  We need the stress in the booth.  How many times has it happened to you in the booth that you've been interpreting and you suddenly come out with a word, and as you were saying it you thought, “where did that come from? I didn't know I knew that word!”  And the reason you can access it is because of the dopamine and the adrenaline which enable you to get, as the Heineken advert says, get to parts of your brain that you can't normally reach.  So it's not just fighting stress, it's actually using stress.  

Alex:  So you're never afraid that the assignment would be too difficult and that you won't be able to do it 100%.  

Chris:  Well first of all, I don't ever manage to interpret 100%.  I never have yet!  If I manage it one day, I’ll let you know.  And that's something I think which also has a de-stressing effect.  Because I think that in interpreting schools, either tacitly or overtly, students are led to believe that you are supposed to reach 100% perfection.  I don't know if this happens in Middlebury, but it certainly happens in lots of other schools.  But it doesn't, as we all know, it doesn't exist.  You cannot interpret perfectly, it just doesn't happen.  

But I find personally what is a massive rampart against stress is knowing that you've done it in the past.  There's a book by Lee Child, in which the character says being afraid of an achievable thing is illogical.  So something which you've done in the past, there's no reason why you can't do it again.  So as long as you've managed to interpret satisfactorily at least once, you need to hang on to that memory.  And then the more times you interpret satisfactorily, every time you're confronted with a situation which is causing you fear and stress you say, “I’ve done it before there's no reason why I can't do it again.”  But of course it's hard at the beginning of the career, because you don't have that storehouse of memories of all the times you've interpreted correctly and and you've resisted the stress and you met the challenges.

Again this is like another part of my life, when I was an ambulance paramedic.  When you're an ambulance paramedic, there isn't time to think.  The only way you can access the right equipment and the right techniques when someone's dying in front of you is to have done it many many times before, so it becomes like an automatism.  So another way of fighting stress, which I find very useful, is to build as many automatic reflexes as you can, muscle memories, because then you know that when you've got nothing left apart from your reflex, the muscle memory is the right one.  It's like having a safety net.  You can jump into the void and land on the safety net, knowing it will not hurt because the net is there and that's what our reflexes to me become, as interpreters.  

And it does take time.  It cannot be done overnight.  All you can do is indicate pointers to people maybe, explain to them that stress doesn't hurt.  It hurts but it doesn't kill.  And then maybe also work with them.  I’m a great believer in actually working with my students, literally, in a physical or in a virtual booth, working with them, showing them rather than explaining. 

And this is one of the principles behind the philosophy of a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which you may have read or heard about.  If you haven't, I recommend you do.  It's a short book, doesn't cost much.  It was one of the personal coaching icons in the 70s.  And there the author Timothy Gallwey, he talks about the fact that you have to get out of your own way and allow the part of you that knows how to do what you want to do, to get on with it and stop criticizing yourself.  He speaks about there being two players:  the player that criticizes and the player that actually gets the job done.  And we spend a lot of our time criticizing ourselves, our own performance, rather than just getting out of our own way and letting the instincts take over.  But the instincts of course have to be built, and you cannot build instincts from scratch.  It does take time.  So you're entirely right.

Alex:  You said that you take your students together with you in your booth, and that's something that is rarely seen elsewhere.  But if that happens to you, and on a different assignment for example, when inadvertently you get a novice in the booth and that person is your boothmate, and you're in a very serious assignment, a high level assignment, and you see that that person is not coping, what would you do?  Would you ask the organizers to find a replacement?  Would you give that person less time?  Or would you let that person fail and learn from mistakes?

Dealing with a novice in the booth

Chris:  That is an interesting scenario Alex, quite a tricky one.  It doesn't happen in my professional life because where I work people can't just turn up and work.  It's extremely hard to get access to my professional environment, and you would not be with somebody who couldn't do it.  It wouldn't happen.  

But in many other contexts - I work in lots of places where I interpret and that situation can and has occurred.  Now it depends to an extent, of course, on how much leeway you have and what the expectations of the client are.  If there is what the French call an “obligation de resultat,” i.e. you have to provide interpreting, you cannot have 30 seconds of a performance which is below the required level, then the option of allowing people to fail is not there.  I would just add by the way as a parenthesis that a lot of my training again is based on sports analogies, and in sports training we say that that failure is a detour and not a dead end.  Which means that failure is something you have to go through to get to your destination, but it's not a dead end.  So failure is useful.  Failure, we learn from failure.  I mean we learn from failure, in life we learn from failure in interpreting.  And to open a second parenthesis - I do a lot of this unfortunately - you cannot hope to navigate life or interpreting without falling flat on your face.  What distinguishes those people who make a career of interpreting and become excellent interpreters from those who remain mediocre or give it up is how you react to the failure - not the fact that you don't fail.  

But to circle back to your question, Alex, which is a very good question, if the situation allows it, and one example of this is where I interpret every Sunday.  I interpret at church.  We interpret everything, the sermon, the songs, everything into French from English.  Now there I will often work with my students who are still master's students, and it's a safe environment because if they fail either for a micro failure or a macro failure, I take over immediately. And the minute they've got their confidence back and I can see from, I can feel from their presence next to me whether they're ready to go again, then  I’ll give them the floor again.  Then if they fail again, I take it back again.  In that situation the clients are more understanding than they would be with my professional employer, who wouldn't understand failure even for five seconds.  It simply can't happen.  

So yes, people need to fail, they need to learn that they can get back in the saddle after failure.  I don't know what your experience is like Dmitry and Alex, but my experience of interpreting is that one of the differences between a true professional and a beginner is that when you fail you get back in the saddle within seconds.  You might miss five seconds, you might miss 10 seconds, but you don't have a bad half hour because that can't happen.  And you get back on again immediately.

Again, if you use the analogy of tennis playing, which is very dear to my heart because it was a career I had in the past, if you missed a shot in tennis and you think about that shot you've just missed, you're going to miss the next shot and the shot after that.  So you certainly cannot afford to let the failure or the partial failure drag you down, because it will damage the rest of your performance. 

So one thing I like to teach my students is to put behind you the inevitable times when you get it wrong and fix your eyes on the next phrase, the next idea, because it's the only way you can progress.

Sound Quality

Dmitry:  Judging by your answers it seems like you're saying that people must fail but not on your watch.  But if we move on to a question that I think is becoming ever more important, given the world of remote simultaneous interpreting and all kinds of iffy technology, and again it may be not that relevant to you in at least some of your working environments, but let's take the quality of incoming sound.  We know that if you're interpreting at a real physical conference and the delegate is not speaking into the microphone, usually it's an easy enough problem to fix.

You can just say that and somebody hopefully will point the delegate's attention to the fact that something needs to be done.  But what if you're in a situation where just the incoming quality of the sound is subpar and you may not even realize this until you actually start interpreting?  All kinds of dodgy things might happen once you start using the same channel.  So you realize you kind of can hear but the quality is really inferior.  What would you, what would be your rule of thumb?  Would you still think that if possible you should try and save the event, interpret maybe 30 percent of what's being said, but you know make the best of this?  Or would you feel entirely justified saying you know the quality of the sound is too low, interpretation is impossible due to technical reasons?

Chris:  It's hugely complex.  The first thing is to know whether your standards are the trade’s standards, i.e you're having difficulty interpreting, some of it may be due to poor sound, some that may be due the density of the speech, some of it may be due to a foreign accent…  There can be lots of stressors and lots of reasons why you're finding interpreting hard.  Now do you know where the bar is set by the profession?  So how do you know whether that sound is generally judged by our profession, by AIIC maybe, or by other instances in our profession, to be insufficient.  If you know where the bar is set and you know what can be reasonably expected by way of interpreting, then you can say when the sound is poor.

And you need to find a way of saying it which is professional, which is calm, which is clear.  Then you need to say the level of sound is insufficient for the interpretation to be accomplished correctly.  The interpreter will begin to interpret again when the sound returns to an acceptable level.  Now to me it's extremely important that you have a wording which you use rather than rely on being completely stressed out and angry at the delegates, at the world, at the computer in front of you, and blurting out something which is not going to be professional or clear.  So it's very important to have a script.  I’ve written out my own scripts in both my working languages.  And then you need to know, can I?  Is it reasonable to implement this script now?

One of my former students in Brussels has launched a hashtag which is #getaheadset, and of course we've all been there.  We're wearing headsets today because we're interpreters and we know what a difference it makes.  And we all know that however good the sound chain, however good your ethernet connection, however good your software, however many other soft pieces of software you've closed down to enable only the interpreting software to function, if delegates don't play by the rules and don't wear a headset, don't use ethernet connection, the sound is going to be insufficient at times.  It will happen inevitably.  One of the environments I interpret in is also highly classified, which means that the signals are companded, they are compressed and then re-expanded, because they have to be encrypted, and that also adds to the lack of clarity of sound.  So all these things can add up to a situation where it is not reasonable to expect the interpreter to be able to interpret on that occasion.

Now then you have to judge, is this going to last 30 seconds is it one speaker who's just answering one question or asking one question and I can cope with it?  Is it going to last half an hour, in which case it would not be reasonable either physiologically or professionally to ask me to interpret with this sound level for half an hour, and I won't do it.

It's also of course the factor of client education.  Because if we have professional interpreters never actually stand up for ourselves in a constructive fashion, and say our goals are your goals, we want the communication to be effective, you want the communication to be effective, sadly for reason x y or zed at the moment it is not effective, so all this has to play into the assessment you're going to make on the fly as to whether it's appropriate to stop interpreting.

But it gets more complicated of course, because we work in teams, don't we?  We work in terms of two or three, and can you make a judgment call which involves your entire team?  Are you head of team?  Do you have a head of team?  In which case you have to work out who has the authorization to make the judgment call.  If you're working in a physical environment where some delegates are present and some are remote, then you can actually explain to the chairman or to the secretary or to the organizers why interpretation is being suspended.  If they're not physically there it's harder to do.

Then of course there's another factor.  Let's say you're interpreting a meeting where English is the lingua franca as it so frequently is, and you're working let's say in my situation into French, which is what I do most of the time.  Now if you say on the French channel, which you're interpreting on, “the sound quality is insufficient, it does not reach professional standards therefore the interpreter will suspend interpretation until such time as the sound returns to normal,” do you say it on the French channel where only the francophones are listening, or do you say it on the English channel where everyone hears you.  In which case, if your script is lengthy, you've already taken up three or four ideas while the speaker is still speaking, and someone who's listening to the English channel is taking in your disclaimer.  So very complex.  I’m not sure whether that was any sort of answer, was it?

Dmitry:  Yeah it was.

Alex:  Because sometimes we are confronted with the situation, and you mentioned being in a team when one interpreter would say oh no sorry, there are technical issues with the sound, we cannot interpret - while you would still think that you could do it, if you get three words out of five you can still make some sense of it.  And if you know that people can't be without interpretation, if it's an important meeting for them and there is absolutely no way that it could be fixed in any foreseeable future, then you would think that you, as an interpreter who is a bridge between cultures and blah blah blah, you need to help them.  So you would tend to say okay, we'll do it somehow, but as you said correctly, you might have a colleague who would say oh no sorry, if he's the first one then basically you can't do anything else, you can't say oh no, I’ll do it so you'll just also have to say yes, sorry we can't do it.

Chris:  Of course you're entirely right and that's why I prefaced my answer on saying you have to know as an interpreter where the standard is, what is the professional standard is, because there are all sorts of reasons why it's hard to interpret but that doesn't mean the interpretation is not possible.  It may be too hard for you, but that may be your fault.  Maybe you certainly aren't a good enough interpreter in which case it could be that the sound is tipping over the whole series of things that make your interpretation difficult.  The sound could be could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.  But if you're a better interpreter, more experienced, calmer, speaking the language better, maybe the sound would not be the over-tipping factor.  So it's important to know where our profession sets the standard.

But you're quite right Alex, of course.  We are programmed, are we not, to communicate.  It's like we want to communicate, we want to get the interpretation done.  But there are times when it simply isn't realistic to do so. Especially if you have to work the next day, and the day after, and that afternoon, and that evening.  You know maybe you could do it for three minutes, but could you do it for three hours?  

“Degraded mode”

Alex:  Now it's very good that you're trying to break into some categories yes saying that there is Threshold A, Threshold B, Threshold C, because sometimes people just give one answer to all situations.  Maybe we could now also move into what you call “degraded mode.”  Maybe you could just describe how you arrived at this, and how it actually helped you in real life interpreting.

Chris:  I must admit that when Alex first wrote to me about degraded mode, I was extremely happy because it's a bit of a lonely furrow which I’ve been plowing now for quite a few years in interpreting training and interpreting.  And I’ll explain how I got there in a minute, but to me it is actually the key.  It is the one technique which is fundamental to correct interpreting in my opinion.  You've got the UN, you've got this place where I work, you have other international organizations, where speeches are consistently very fast, very dense, and where the political stakes are extremely high.  And all these things add up to making interpretation extremely difficult.  Which is why I came up with “degraded mode.”  

Now I also call it “limp home mode” and “get you home mode.”  The illustration I use on the first page is a picture of the warning light you get when your car is about to break down, because as a rally driver I’m also very much into all things automotive.  And it struck me a number of years ago that the degraded mode, which is allowed in modern cars by the computerized systems, which take information from a whole series of inputs around the vehicle system, allows the vehicle to continue to function but at a lower level of performance.  And I said to myself, well that's basically what interpreters brains are doing, because our interpreters brains are extremely complex mechanisms which can work - you know, there can be a continuum between 0% of interpreting and 100% of interpreting and you can situate your interpreting on all sorts of levels between the naught and the hundred, preferably getting closer to 100 more of the time.

So to circle back again to what you were saying, I actually developed the mode simply as a means of survival, because coming from school - I trained in the UK, in the Bath interpreting school - it was a real cold shower to arrive at my international organization employer and find this very very difficult interpreting which had to be done all day long every day, where people would speak Globish, they would speak extremely fast, it would be extremely dense, often very technical, and there simply was no other way to survive as an interpreter than to apply degraded mode.  Now I didn't develop the whole concept at that stage.  All I knew was that I did what I could, and then when I couldn't do any more I didn't give up, but interpretation became insufficient in my opinion.  So I thought there has to be a better way.  Now, very frequently, to hark back to what Dmitry was saying, I think it's held by interpreters as long as you say everything the speaker said you've done your job.  They say 192 words, you say 192 words.  That's it.  The customers can sort themselves out.  But to me, I think we should aim much higher than that.  I think that we are actually there to communicate.  

Now you and I know because we're all experienced interpreters here that people on the whole don't communicate very well.  International meetings, especially if they're speaking Globish God help us and people think they're communicating but they're not, we know this because we're experts in communication.  We sit there listening to meetings day in day out, and we think my God the level of communication here is very poor.  All people are doing basically standing up on their hind legs reading their fast speech and sitting down again.  And then of course you get the standard response where the chairman says, “would you mind giving us your speaking notes so we can append them to the minutes of the meeting?” which is shorthand for saying we can’t understand a word you were saying.  And is that communication?  No, it's not communication.  

I think we owe it to the world to promote a better model.  So how do you actually communicate when to say every single word the speaker is saying would not be communication?  And this is even more the case - I don't know about Russian, I think Russian's probably the same - if you're working from English, which is probably the most concise language on the planet, you can say a lot of stuff in English in a short time. 

Now certainly in French, which is my other working language, you have to add 30% more words roughly, and if we're talking about technical English we have to add 50% more words.  So if I’m speaking at a rhythm of 180 words per minute, which is a fast rhythm, and I personally can manage 220-230 without any problems at all but it's not very easy to understand, so if you're working you're speaking at 180 words per minute and you're reading a text which has been condensed and refined a dozen times beforehand so there's nothing superfluous, and then the interpreter is working into Russian or into French or into Greek and is adding 30% more words that makes 180 plus 30%, which is 235 words per minute, and it's too much!  No human brain can take in 235 words per minute, it simply cannot be done, so to me it's almost evading your responsibility as an interpreter to say  I’ve just said all the words.  It's like getting the words, throwing up in the air and let them fall down where they fall, and let the delegates try and pick the words up and put them into ideas.  

That is not what we're about.  We should do better than that so degraded mode is actually, to me it's the hardest technique in interpreting, alongside simultaneous with text.  These are the two top level most difficult techniques.  And degraded mode, you can't do it simply because you can't interpret.  You have to master the technique, know what it's all about, and then you apply it calmly, collectedly and electively.  I mean you actually choose to apply it rather than applying it because you have no choice.  So you don't wait for failure to arrive, you anticipate, which I say in my article.  And you say, “today I’m going to need degraded mode for this speaker, I’m going to need it for this speech, I’m going to need it for these five minutes.  For whatever reason, I’m going to need to move into degraded mode,” and you do it from the start.  And obviously the difficulty is that it entails an extra level of mental processing because you have to say to yourself, “is this thing I’ve just said superfluous or is it essential to the argument?  Is that word important?  Can I miss this word out?  Can I use a shorter word?”  

To me one of them one of the best techniques for approaching degraded mode, to lower the cognitive load on your customer and yourself. and I haven't said enough yet that, as the English say, a rising tide floats all boats, so we all win.  The interpreter is better off, and the delegates are better off because the interpretation becomes comprehensible rather than being an avalanche of words, which is not communication.  But of course to implement the system it requires a lot of practice, a lot of awareness and a lot of technical skill.  

But, if you like, the two biggest components to me of degraded mode are having a smaller time lag with the speaker, which is difficult in a B language.  I recommend a time lag of not more than two seconds maximum, and I very frequently work with a time lag of one second.  In fact I was working with a a student today, training them for an international organization, and they said, “you actually finished several sentences before the speaker did.” I said, “yes I did, because I knew what he was going to say, it was obvious.”  And that's also obviously a tricky part of the degraded mode anticipation.  So I would say small lag, and consistently using short words and short structures which enables you to get the same idea across saying less.

Analytical vs Ping-Pong Interpreting

Dmitry:  It seems that there are two general fashions of simultaneous interpretation, and maybe even two different types of interpreters who favor one over the other.  But what's your take on it?  It seems that there's the more analytical approach, where your default is that you process a lot.  You really understand where the speaker is coming from, you have time to sort of monitor the message at a number of levels, including this overarching idea.  You know where the speaker is going with this whole speech, and trying to make sense of it.  And there's just sort of staying really close to the speaker, trying to respond to each word or phrase with a word or phrase not necessarily always knowing what it is you're saying, or how this all plays into the bigger picture, but being really quick with your reflexes, having a flexible vocabulary, and being able to play this game of simultaneous interpretation ping pong.

Would you agree that that's something that you've noticed about these two modes?  Would you agree that maybe for example you know that where analytical interpretation is just not possible you have to resort to just meeting words with words, and there's no other option if you're already in this situation?  Or would you, for example, based on what you've been saying about degraded mode, would you say that only analytical interpretation is real interpretation and if you're not really monitoring the message, if you're not sure what you're saying or why, then that's something wrong you should be doing it differently

Chris:  The first thing I would say is that the whole idea of degraded mode shouldn't be taken as a justification for doing bad interpreting.  That I’m not saying at all and I hope I make it very clear in my article that it is not an alibi for being a poor interpreter, saying I can't get this idea across therefore I will move into degraded mode now.  The idea to me is that I could get the idea across.  I could interpret every single word that comes out of the delegate's mouth because I have the ability cognitively and linguistically to do so, but it would not be fruitful because it would not communicate ideas to people who are depending upon me, so I choose not to do it.  And again, degraded mode can't be partial interpreting.  You have to get everything across because I don't think that our mandate is to censor the original.  We have to be able to get everything across.  It's simply the way in which you do so, using fewer words, using shorter words, and actually using your mental abilities to process, as you said Dmitry, the avalanche of words into something which is molded into an easily accessible message.

Now there are times, now I’ve worked for the last 32 years in an organization where you get a mixture of very very high level diplomacy - heads of state and government, ministerial meetings, involving your country as well - where the political states can be very high and sensitivities run extremely high.  And then, on the other hand, an equal number of our meetings are extremely technical, where the actual content is all and the format is nothing, whereas in diplomatic interpreting it's often the contrary.  Often the message is very very simple, it's the way in which the message is communicated that is complex.  So they require different approaches.

I think when you're doing what you, I think Dmitry are referring to as word substitution, where you're interpreting at a very very high technical level, where you with all the with the best will in the world don't understand every single parameter involved because you are not a chemist or a physicist or a cardiothoracic surgeon.  Now there are times when all you can do is word substitution, I agree, and I’ve done this many times in my career.  It's not ideal.  We don't like to do it I think as interpreters.  But there are times when it's unavoidable, although most of the time that isn't the case.  So I would say that processing interpreting, the interpreting method Dmitry you refer to as processing-based, is superior to simple word substitution.

Now one of the problems with young interpreters or interpreters who are not at the summit of their profession is that they have to do word substitution when with more experience they could do processing, because they don't understand the ideas.  They don't understand the reference points.  They don't understand the context which means all they have left are the words.  But that is more a matter of bad interpreting than it is a matter of a chosen philosophy of interpreting.  

Tips on Jokes and Quotes

Alex:  Now, what is your success recipe when you hear the speaker using a quote from Shakespeare, or some Russian diplomat sending cryptic messages with proverbs, or someone telling jokes?

Chris:  I think that interpreting is a wonderful art, I think it's a very complex procedure, and I also think that most rich practitioners leave a lot to be desired.  And I think we should always better interpreters, which is one of the reasons why I run the Cambridge Course, because it pains me, it physically pains me, to see people paying money for interpretation and then getting a substandard product. In the same way if a [tyre failed] in a corner and caused me to crash I don't want a substandard, I want a good product.  And I think that generally speaking, the level which we accept in our profession is too low.  I think we need to aim higher and be more ambitious.  

Now to come back to your idea of the Russian diplomats quoting Pushkin or whatever it might be, it seems to me that in my experience, it usually tends to be Pushkin, I think personally that it's a wonderful present to an interpreter to have a speaker who quotes literature, who makes jokes, who uses word play, because it enables us to show the full panoply of our skills.  But only if we have a full panoply of skills.  The reason I put together the talk, or the whole concept which I often talk about, of interpreting quotations, jokes and that sort of thing, is because the general reaction of an interpreter I find when someone quotes an author or a poem or makes a joke or says wordplay is to shut down.  You see the shutters behind the interpreter's eyes shut down.  The interpreter is thinking, without thinking, is thinking, “I can't be expected to do that, it's literature,” or, “I can't be expected to do that, it's a poem,” or, “they can't expect me to interpret that because it's Russian or English or French from three centuries ago!”  

[Hamlet:  Conscience doth make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of resolution is sickly with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.]

Chris:  I don't agree.  I think yes of course we can be expected to interpret it, we're supposed to interpret everything. And the harder it is the more it gives you the chance to show how good you are!  Which to me is one of my stress techniques as well.  To me you should be actively looking for hard things to interpret because they give you a chance to bask in the beauty of good interpreting, which is a massive pleasure.  

You know why we interpret?  We interpret because it gives us a rush, among other things, and it gives you more of a rush when the obstacles to be overcome are greater.  In the same way that in a rally car, you don't want to rally on a motorway, it's boring.  There are no bends.  You want difficult roads.  In the south of France, in the alps, where you have gravel on the road, you have ice, and you have snow, and you have camber, and you have corners, you can cut, which enables you to actually deploy your skills. So the more the speaker says, “allow me now to quote our national poet from the 14th century,” and he turns to the booth and says, “I’m not sure what the translators are going to do with this,” and I say, “bring it on! Make it hard! Give me a chance to shine!”

And that to me obviously is based on confidence. You have to have confidence in your own abilities. You also have to have knowledge of literature. You have to have knowledge of registers in your active languages that aren't common registers. You know, if I want to say in English, “the lady does protest too much methinks,” there's a whole series of things in that phrase in English which are not normal modern English.  And if you can't master that, you can't really have a decent shot of interpreting literature.

The same goes for jokes. I love interpreting jokes. In fact, in the Cambridge Course there's a joke which I like, what we call in English a shaggy dog story. You know the term “shaggy dog story.” It's a long joke, a joke that lasts for ages. And I tell these because I’ve interpreted many times in the booth these very lengthy jokes. And of course you're interpreting and you're hoping against hope that the actual punch line will be interpretable, because you don't know, and you find a solution. What do you do if it's not interpretable, or if it's not easy to interpret? Well I was actually doing this on Saturday. I had a class with my second year masters students, and we used a speech by, you may have heard of him, Ken Robinson, who is a very very able, he's a theoretician. He died recently. A theoretician on education in the UK. And the man is a master, he has masterful comic timing.

[Ken Robinson:  So he went off to Tibet and and joined a monastery, and he's been a monk now for over 30 years. And he's been a close associate of the Dalai Lama. And also he's taken part in all kinds of research into the effects of meditation on the brain.I was actually very interested in the science of meditation. So Matthew Ricard, Mathieu, there’s the French for you, Mathieu is officially recognized now as the happiest person on earth. Honestly that must be a burden, mustn't it, socially.  You can't show up anywhere and be miserable, you know. People get you under the Trade Descriptions act. I mean, what's this, you know?]

Chris:  He's brilliant. And of course my students who are mostly French, and French A's, don't understand humor in the same way that the Brits do. It's a different way of looking at the world. And so while this year I have a very good cohort of students, they're one of the best I’ve ever had, they simply could not do it because they didn't get the humor, and they didn't see the humor coming. And so I said to them, if you've got an audience who starts to laugh this should give you an idea that what the speaker just said was funny, so you've got to find some way of making your customers laugh. Now you may have to tell a different joke, you may have to say, “for God's sake please laugh or the interpreter will get the sack,” something like that which always works, or just use a few words like, “and there you have it! I think  I’ve said it all - surely that's enough!” Something like that, and people will start to grin.

There are hundreds of ways of doing it, but you have to dare to do it. And what annoys me, and what I try to overcome by teaching this, is that people don't even try now. I have no problem with interpreters not being good enough. I mean you learn, we all learn, we get better - we hope - as our careers progress, but to me failing to try is a sin.

Now I speak a lot at international meetings about my charity work. I work with refugees and I like to quote Shakespeare. I like all sorts of stuff. I like the Bible, I quote it a lot. And if I quote something in a speech I damn well want the interpreter just to interpret it, because to me it's important to me. And I think when a speaker quotes, they have all sorts of reasons for quoting. And I have an entire class on this by the way, where I speak about the various reasons why people quote, but usually the quotation is like the major part of this feature, the part they love best. And if the interpreter declines to interpret it because it's too hard or because they can't be expected to because it's literature, then they're not being interpreted. And to me, if we say if we say to our customer, “make your speech, use your language to its full and I will interpret what you have to say,” we need to do it. And if we can't do it, we should give the money back. So if you put it in simplistic terms, let's say that 20% of a speech is quotation and you don't interpret the quotations, give back 20% of your fee!

And what I try and do as a first step to help young interpreters learn to interpret, to give what I call the full fat experience of a speech. which involves all these complex literary asides and jokes and the rest of it, is to actually have a go. If you don't have a go, of course you can't do it. You start to have a go, you say  “I’m going to try, I’m going to give it a try,” which is more or less the content of one of the slides I think Alex was referring to that I used in the TerpSummit, giving all the various levels at which you might want to pitch your interpreting when you're faced with something complicated or a quotation - you know, what is the basic level, what is the best level, and you have all sorts of gradations in between - and to me again it's a matter of mindset. It's a matter of saying, “yes I can be expected to interpret this, it is not beyond my ability. It is important to the speaker therefore it is important to me, and if I can't do it today I will find a way to do it tomorrow and maybe tomorrow  I’ll be able to do 30% of it. And maybe in five years’ time I can do 100% of it.”

But to me it's rather like a horse, a puissance horse, show jumping, you know, coming at an obstacle and stopping, and refusing to try and jump the obstacle. If we refuse to try will never develop. it's like one of the cartoons I use in my stress class: a man lying on the floor and his friend comes up and said, “why are you lying on the floor?” He says, “well, I was dropped as a baby.” You know, okay, we may start on the floor but we don't have to stay on the floor our entire lives.

Tips on dealing with obscenities

Alex:  Okay that's a good one. So we've talked about the nice things. What about the bad things? Have you ever had to deal with obscenities?

Chris:  Very tricky, depends on the context, like everything in interpreting. You know there is a head of state not far removed from the country which you two could come from, who has a habit of coming out with some fairly complex phrases to interpret which would provide a challenge which you would not expect as an interpreter. And there are other speakers, also in South America, and in fact these days, with the rise of populism, there are quite a lot of leaders now who don't tend to play by the rules, you know, by the hitherto accepted rules. And one of them has recently stepped down from a major superpower, and these people don't speak like normal diplomats. And it can be a challenge because you sort of know as an interpreter what the rules of the game are, and you say oh I can be fairly sure that we're not going to hear the n word or the c word or the f word coming out of the mouth of a diplomat or indeed any speaker in an international conference, but that isn't always the case.

And very frequently these days with populists they will actually use language to shock in that way, and that opens a whole new kind of worms. What is the mandate, I mean Dmitry referred earlier to where our remit ends. So I thought it was a nice phrase actually, where does our remit end? And it's a very complex answer to that question, and I don't purport to have the only truth. I think that we are hired as interpreters to get the same idea and impression into the minds of our customers as reaches the minds of those listening directly, so if a speaker uses a a rude word which is perhaps rude in my culture maybe not in yours… I mean my wife comes from the United States, and they use some words I would never dream of using in the UK, because it's a different culture. And so what might be acceptable to an American would not be acceptable to a Brit. And what might be acceptable to a Frenchman might not be to a Spaniard. And so that's a matter of knowing the culture of the languages which you interpret. And of course you should, because otherwise you're not really an interpreter.

But to come back to what you were saying, I don't think there are many situations. There's only been one that I can recall in my entire career where I actually didn't interpret something because it was embarrassing, and in some ways I think I wanted to spare the delegate the embarrassment of having other people understand what he said. Basically, you're sexist and it was something which I personally found offensive but that didn't mean that I shouldn't interpret it. But I made a judgment call in the moment that a lot of people would have found it offensive, and that would have rebounded against the person who used the expression, which I think would not have helped the debate in that room on that day. Had he said it three or four times, then I would have I would have interpreted it. But if it slipped out once I think that I served the communication in that meeting better by not by not saying what he said.

I can think of other instances where people have said things which were which were purposely embarrassing or tendentious or annoying in which case, go for it! Because if they're doing it on purpose, I mean I’m thinking for example of interpreting the first time I came across such a situation was with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whom I’m sure you know, who comes from the country you come from. And as you probably know, he doesn't speak in in a very classical fashion. And in this case he was speaking English. And I was thinking if a speaker has certain ideas which are perhaps not mainstream, let's put it that way, if you interpret these ideas faithfully you give the whole world the chance to realize that these ideas are not mainstream. So I really don't think that part of our remit is to censor. I don't see why it would be, quite frankly. So personally, speaking as an interpreter who enjoys the challenge, I like it when people start to shout at each other and to use off-the-wall terminology, because it gives me a chance to exercise my interpreting muscle.

Alex:  Well thank you for confirming my own observations, that usually the test, the criteria would be whether it's done on purpose or not. So if it's done on purpose you interpret that. If it's done, you know, accidentally, then you'd better stay on the safe side.

Nasty customers

Dmitry:  Let's maybe talk a little bit about clients. Have you ever faced some ridiculousness on the part of the clients, any unreasonable demands or complaints? What, if you could give us some examples of some of the most unreasonable things that have been said about your interpretation…

Chris:  Until we realize that as interpreters we're moving in an environment where nobody else in that environment understands what makes our lives easy or hard, until we understand that we're not going to be serene as interpreters, we're not going to be happy. We're not going to be high performance either because we need to understand that every other player in the meeting environment has no idea what goes on in our heads and no idea what makes our life hard or easy.

So I think it's important to start from that premise. They're not doing it on purpose generally when expectations are unrealistic of interpreters, it's because the people don't understand what's going on. And I have many examples I can quote of the lack of understanding of delegates and users and minute writers and secretaries and sound technicians. For example a sound technician doesn't interpret and they will often supply headphones or headsets that aren't appropriate for interpreting because they haven't ever used them for interpreting. That's just an example.

One thing I’ve come across on a number of occasions has been, I found this rather unjust, a customer or client complaining that the interpreter was speaking too fast, I don't just mean me who speaks fast, when all the interpreter was actually doing was speaking as fast as the delegate. But of course the client wasn't listening to the delegate. The client was listening to the interpreter. So I think it's hardly fair to criticize the interpreter for speaking at the same speed as the delegate, which very frequently working from English is still going to involve using “get you home mode” to an extent because to keep the same speed and not increase the speed you have to prune. So I don't think it's legitimate to criticize. Of course the customer doesn't know this. All the customer knows is they've heard somebody speaking very fas,t so that's often been a source of wonderment to me.

Generally speaking another thing which obviously happens to all of us I think, at least I’m sure it's happened to you too, is when the interpreter becomes a pawn in the political game. And I don't know where you two work, I don't know enough about your careers to be able to speak properly about this, but in lots of international environments the interpretation is one component in a political game. I think it's important to realize that, and sometimes we can be used like a fuse you know, we're using the fuse and we're accused of having interpreted wrongly when all that’s happened is a speaker having gone too far off and said the wrong thing and is desperately trying to recover without losing face. And so I think it's important when you work for an international organization to realize that you are a component in the - it's like a play, in a play basically. And the linguistic part of it is one more factor in the interplay between nations, between ambassadors, between ministers, between national delegates, and sometimes you will be used as a pretext.

And of course it feels profoundly unfair when you know you've done a good job and the speaker says, “I was mistranslated,” and you know you haven't, you didn't get it wrong. Everyone turns to the booth and says, “oh the translator or the interpreter got it wrong.” The only, the best way to counter that in my own experience is to know you did it correctly. Now if it goes further and there is a whole case made of this, and then everyone has to listen to the recordings of the interpretation, then you can be either validated or not validated depending on what the recording says. But to me it's a matter of understanding that we are part of the game at certain levels of interpreting, and that is not that is not something which is against nature. It's just part of the process, and you shouldn't take it personally. When a delegate will resort to that alibi to save their own skin.

Alex:  That was the first thing I learned on day one in this profession. I was made the scapegoat, and I was told about that at the end of the day, so I learned it the hard way.

Okay, we talked about the worst, the most ridiculous things. But maybe you can recall, you know, some unexpected praise that you've ever received from your customers or audience that came out of the blue? Or maybe you received a round of applause?

Ego vs Humility - or both?

Chris:  I suppose it depends a lot on context because, as I’m sure both of you are aware, when you work in an international organization, the interpretation is rather like hot and cold running water. They turn on the tap and they expect the water to come out of it, and people don't think about the process of getting that water to the tap. It's as the French say, you're part of the of the furniture. And there praise tends to be, if you get praise, it can often be routine. It's part of what a chairman will say to thank the interpreters. It doesn't matter if they're listening to the interpreters, they're going to thank you, which is nice, but we know it doesn't mean anything because it doesn't come from a place of knowledge. It's just part of protocol.

One of the students once in the Cambridge Course in a final analysis of the Course said that you taught me two indispensable things, which are arrogance and humility. And I think we need a very big dose of both.

As regards praise, I think if you get praise it's obviously wonderful to bask in the praise, but to an extent you shouldn't make interpreting about yourself, because if we do that it means that we're misplacing our place in the meeting environment. I think we're a component of the meeting, but it's not about us of course, and we all know that interpreters who become interpreters because they want to become close to the seat of power or to spend time with important people tend to be unhappy interpreters. So I think it's very healthy to always remember your place in in the meeting environment, and when you get praise to be happy but not to say to yourself, “oh it's all about me,” because the meeting is never all about us.

I think that when you get criticized the same can hold true, and you can say to yourself, “well it's not about me. I am one of the tools in this meeting environment. The fact that I was criticized is undesirable but it doesn't really matter that much.”

One thing I push my students to do is not to take criticism or praise personally and to imagine that they're wearing a superhero costume, so when you interpret you put on your superhero costume. You go into the booth or you can stand on the stage and you do the interpreting, and then the brick bats or the bouquets of flowers which get thrown at you afterwards are thrown at that persona and not you. And I think that's a very good way with young interpreters for example to be able to differentiate the personal from the professional, because we all know, do we not, that you tend to invest a lot in your interpretation.

That's what we do with interpreters, we invest. It's what we are. It's who we are to an extent, but that can have a very nasty downside in that when the interpretation gets criticized negatively we feel that we're being criticized as people. And so to me the idea of putting on the superhero costume, and then taking it off again when you get back into civilian life at the end of your interpreting, can be very useful psychologically.

Mistakes

Dmitry:  You've mentioned the word, you've used the word humility, and that was another thing that we meant to ask you about. Could you think of maybe one of the most humiliating mistakes that you've made, let's put it this way not necessarily humiliating mistakes, but something that you think that you should have done differently professionally, where you failed, or maybe were in the verge of failure, which taught you something and made you change something in the way you work and the way you prepare, or maybe in the way you communicate with your colleagues. So some, you know, teaching moment that came the hard way.

Chris:  I suppose if we're limiting it to teaching rather than interpreting, it's very important to clearly accept your limits and not purport to know everything. Especially in today's environment where students can very quickly look up things on the internet and work out whether you're correct or not. So that's something which pushes you I think to have a healthy dose of humility realizing that it's not anybody's ability to know everything. And admitting mistakes is important in life and it's important in interpreting.

I think it's important to call yourself into question as an interpreter. That's why I like to listen to myself frequently and to ask my students for feedback on my interpreting. Usually they're too scared to give any, but I try and push them because I want to know if I’m losing it or if I’m resting on my laurels, because we can tend to do that. So I think just like in politics it's important to surround yourself with people who will speak truth, not to power, but speak truth to the interpreter. We need feedback on our performance constantly, and we need to realize that perfection is not of this world. It certainly doesn't exist in interpreting, and that also I think in the training context is really important. Because if we hold out some unattainable standard of perfection and say this is what you have to reach as a young interpreter, then I think we're being uncharitable and unrealistic. And that would offend me.

As regards moments where I have fallen flat on my face, yes we've definitely done it. I mean it's the standard sort of thing we get when interpreting Globish. It's the chairman saying, “now I would like to,” a German chairman saying, “I will now give the floor to France,” and so you say in French, you say, “I will now get the floor to the French delegation,” and the poor German delegate who is called Franz doesn't get the floor, and the French delegate says, “well, I didn't ask for the floor.”

That sort of thing's happened to me on a number of occasions. I remember another occasion when I was interpreting at church and, I’m sharing full transparency here, which is very embarrassing, and the chair - and the speaker says, and in my defense the speaker was not an English A, “it reminds me of a song from Genesis.” So I’m thinking church, Genesis, Bible, okay, we're safe there, so I say, “it reminds me of something of a reference in the book of Genesis.” And of course the speaker was talking about the pop group. Now had the speaker said, “a Genesis song,” then I might be okay! But that was very embarrassing. But I fixed it obviously, but the harm was done. So it happens all the time.

Staying in the booth?

Alex:  Okay, so my final question on the booth would be do you, what's your practice? Do you usually stay in the booth when your shift is over to help with numbers, you know with the quotes, or do you just leave, you know, to have some leisure time, to have a cup of coffee and to talk to your colleagues out there? What's your practice?

Chris:  It's a bit of a minefield, because it depends on whether you're, to an extent, whether you're a staff interpreter or a freelance interpreter. It depends on whether your next contract depends on how will you, how much willing you show in your last contract. It depends on a lot of things.

First of all I would say that I spend a lot of time lecturing on teamwork and interpreting, and strangely enough I’m sure you've all, you both experienced this too, especially Dmitry I imagine if he's regularly at Middlebury, one thing which is very hard for young interpreters is to actually take in help from the outside. Not giving help but taking in help, because help can be a distraction. And a big component in my teaching is to put students in a real booth situation, or indeed a virtual booth situation, working with somebody which is what I’m currently arranging for my group of students this year, where you learn to give help and to receive help. So that's a technical thing. As such, I think receiving help when you're stressed out of your mind and you're already at the limit of your abilities, having that mental ability left over to take in help coming to you from your booth mate is essential, absolutely essential. And of course, a beginner needs help more than an experienced interpreter.

But as regards whether you stay or leave well it depends on lots of things. Where I work for 32 years as a staff interpreter, when you're working day in day out with the same people, you know who needs help and who doesn't need help. Also, if you're working as a staff interpreter you have admin stuff to do, because being an interpreter is only one part of what you do as an international civil servant. And a lot of the work you have to do when you go to work is not just interpreting. So I think you'll probably find as a rule staff interpreters tend to stay in the booth less than freelance interpreters.

It's really important I think to stay in the booth because the performance of the team is everything, and of course you work with two or three of you. It depends also on whether you're all doing the same combination, you know, if you're working on a bi-active meeting where you are all in theory interchangeable, you all have an A>B, B>A combination, you don't necessarily need to stay in the booth in case the delegate whose language you are the only one to have speaks. That's a different circumstance. In that case obviously you have no choice, you stay in the booth all day long.

But as regards helping, it's psychologically complex isn't it, because some people will be offended if you offer them help, some people are too shy to ask for help. To me it's a matter of emotional intelligence. as so much of interpreting is a matter of empathy and emotional intelligence.

[Now I'd like to move on to the very technical document that's uh document eight nine four one slash fifteen rev three. um I’m just going to teach the list of very practical details. I haven't got this have you got this one? It'll be in the pile. um starting with that very difficult issue there's that other point as well and okay so here's the list for you now, I’ve got four chicken breasts, one pork rasher, a loo roll, ah no sorry, that was the wrong list…]

Chris:  I think if you want to be a good interpreter you have to have a maximum amount of empathy because that's what it entails to get into the skin of a delegate, for example, to live that delegate’s experience. Like method acting. So that matter of empathy.

And the same empathy can extend to your booth mate. Does that person want help? Are they too shy to ask for it if I give it to them? Is it going to stress them even more than not giving it to them, if I point out their mistakes as it were by writing down the number which they just got wrong? And do I then point to it insistently to make sure they correct it? And is that simply going to stress them even further and make them lose it even more?

On the other hand is the interpreter next to me for example somebody with a great reputation but who perhaps isn't as good as they like to make out, and don't want any witnesses to their mistakes? So would it not be emotionally more agreeable to leave the booth so as not to be a witness to their mistakes which they'd rather have not have spoken about?

Really complex! But it's something which I think is not taught enough in schools, the idea of teamwork, the idea of helping and not helping, and how do you assimilate help, how do you provide help, how do you actually make the help useful rather than it being an ego trip to show that you got something right which the person on the mic didn't get right. And there again it's very important to realize that it's easy to be wise after the event, or it's very easy to catch something when you're not on the mic which your colleague has missed because they're concentrating.

Worst possible boothmate

Dmitry:  Maybe if you have a quick answer to this, what are the qualities of the worst possible boothmate?

Chris:  [laughs] It puts me in mind of what a very famous French booth interpreter used to say, a very famous teacher too. He would say, “The conference interpreter washes. The conference interpreter washes every day.” I suppose people who stink. You like spending time with people who smell. People who shout, especially in a mobile booth where you can't open the door for fear of annoying the delegates. And the same holds true for people who smell. People wearing too much perfume. People hogging the mic or not wanting to take the mic.

[Film:  Ready for our presentation on swine fever. Swine fever! I know a lot about it, read a lot, I’ll do this one! So yes, thank you for giving me the floor chairman… Thank you Poland. And now I'd like to hand the floor to Austria. He's really difficult, I know this. Tell you what, I’ll do him. Yes, thank you chairman, for giving me the floor on what is a very… Thank you, and now I'd like to hand the floor over to Rudolph…Thank you very much indeed!]

The role of hobbies

Alex:  You talked a lot about your different and diverse hobbies throughout the interview so what we've identified, what we found is that actually hobbies can help interpreters do a better job by training their reaction and responsiveness. And you know all these psychosomatic things that may help in the skill itself. So could you maybe dwell on it a little bit more and tell us about your hobbies and the way they help you in your career?

Chris:  Thanks for asking that question because it is something which hadn't actually occurred to me until someone pointed it out one day, that I do things which a lot have a lot in common with interpreting, maybe dangerous things, maybe things where failure carries a heavy price. I suppose the tennis which was my first real career after leaving university, tennis is something we have to be in the moment, where you have to use stress to scale greater heights rather than allowing yourself to be dismantled by stress. To have absolute concentration which you can switch on like the flick of a switch instantaneously. Being able to put past mistakes out of your mind again instantaneously and get back on in the saddle immediately. The idea of missing a shot because you're thinking about the shot you just missed, that sort of thing. The idea also which as I mentioned is part of the inner game of tennis concept of allowing your instincts to take over and stop out thinking yourself, stop second guessing yourself and going with the flow, basically.

I suppose the paramedic work - now there the stakes are high because the stakes could be death. I mean if you get it wrong with a paramedic you can allow someone to die or even cause someone to die, and that taught me a lot about the importance of preparation, the importance of requiring muscle memory. Let's say you've got a heart attack, right? You arrive with the ambulance in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, it's pouring, its raining, it's a stressful environment. you need to know where every cannula is kept, where the electrodes for the defibrillator are kept. You can't be thinking about it. You need to know where the right syringe is, where the adrenaline is kept, all these things have to be like muscle memory. You reach to the right and you pick up the adrenaline, you reach to the left and you get the electrodes to plug into the defibrillator. You can't be thinking, “where do we keep the electrodes? And how much of what voltage we have to apply?” Here it all has to be muscle memory and that only can be acquired through constant practice. So from that point of view where human lives can be at stake, it's essential to practice very frequently and to have to have protocols you know, i.e. the syringe is always kept in the top right hand drawer, you know, don't go looking for the syringe, that sort of thing. And that interpreting can be extremely useful I think to have protocols, to have muscle memory, to have habits where you just reflexively reach for something and it's there.

Rally driving is something different again, because rally driving taught me concentration. If you miss your breaking point ,or you fail to see a patch of ice or gravel on the apex of a bend you could be dead, which is even worse than interpreting. Interpreting, if your mind wanders momentarily, you probably won't die immediately. You might you might just lose that client

[Film:  engine noise]

So the stakes at play in rally driving taught me a lot about being in the moment and having total focus. In rallying it's on the next bend, in the booth it's on the next idea. And that, to me, that this faculty to be able to concentrate, to go from zero to 100 as it were in concentration instantaneously is something which lots of young interpreters don't manage to acquire easily. It's something which I think an experienced interpreter has in spades, being able to ramp up your effort immediately and not allow yourself to be distracted. In interpreting, if you allow yourself to think about anything other than the next idea, you're going to miss something. In rally driving, if you allow any thought to intrude which is not the next breaking point, you're going to crash.

Alex:  On this positive note…

[end]