This is interesting – there don’t seem to be any physical outliers in the interpreting world.
That tracks with athletics. The top .001% of the best sprinters in the world compete every four years, but they are very close in ability. You’ll never see a sprinter run a race 25% faster than everyone else.
Yes, there is something strange about the processing of numbers in the brain, I think. I am a native speaker of English but have a good command of conversational Spanish and French. Simple numbers like 15 or 100 are no problem, but something like 1,489 or, worse, a phone number will sail right by me. And it’s not innumeracy, I am an economist/statisticain and do math puzzles for fun.
That is my experience and this is the field where I have the most, but I am ready to stand corrected if somebody knows differently. I suppose that this is so because conference interperters and elite athletes already work close to the limit of what is possible. You can do it, but you can hardly improve it much. Well, let’s wait and see how long it takes until computer outdo us. Ten years ago I would have said it is impossible, now I wonder how long it will take.
regarding automated computer translations…
There will be several milestones in this journey. We’re already using real-time computer translations to some degree, and I’ve already commented here and there, “Wow! No big mistakes!” Later on, teachers will notice how the computer seems to understand idioms. Finally, the professionals will remark how the computer captured the nuances better than they themselves could have. (When it gets to that point, the philosophers and computer scientists will war over whether machines can “think”.)
That’s interesting. In the spring of 1990 when I was on sabbatical at Penn I went to a talk by a deaf linguist about the linguistics of ASL (not different from spoken languages to a formal linguist) and I wondered about the interpreter. At first, she interpreted the sign into English, but then in the question period she interpreted the questions into sign. I conjectured that she had grown with one or two deaf parents. But clearly that is not necessarily true.
I briefly had a girlfriend who was an interpreter. This was back in the 60s and she did conferences and seminars, not politics.
She told me that they usually had a copy of speeches in advance and just had to be careful if the speaker went off piste so to speak. With jokes, she said that the usual trick was to just say, “The speaker made a joke”.
Ooooooooh. I wasn’t allowed to do that. The only time I could ever get away with "The speaker just said was when the speaker said something extemporaneously in a language I didn’t know, and it appeared most of the audience didn’t know either. If it seemed that most of the audience understood, and it was possible to do so, I needed to ask the speaker for a translation.
I’m very glad I took Latin in high school-- I don’t read big chunks of it, but I can figure out aphorisms, and most things people might say extemporaneously without translating, to a group in the medical or legal field. The only other field where someone might expect everyone to understand random comments in another language that I have been put in, is Jewish situations where people have said things in Hebrew or Yiddish.
An added pressure is that English is the lingua fraca, and as such, in many audiences, there will be a considerable number of people who know English well enough to know if you’ve screwed up and interpreted something incorrectly.
I think the idea about saying " the speaker made a joke" is because humor can be difficult or impossible to translate - particularly jokes that depend on wordplay. For example, “I renamed my iPod The Titanic, so when I plug it in, it says ‘The Titanic is syncing’ " or " Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak” probably don’t work in any languages other than English. Sure, you can translate the words, but if “bright” doesn’t have the dual meanings of “intelligent” and “giving off light” in the other language" or if the words you would use to translate “sinking” and “synching” aren’t homophones in the other language, the sentences won’t make any sense.
We’re still supposed to interpret it an explain it. If we ignore or paraphrase something, we get in trouble. Deaf people talk. If you get a reputation as an interpreter who skips over jokes, people will start requesting not to have you.
Simultaneous interpretation is also used for Canadian parliamentary and election debates. I remember listening in on one broadcast in the 1990s where the female leader of the NDP (Audrey McLaughlin or Alexa McDonough; I don’t remember which) was speaking in French, and the English interpretation was done not only by a man, but one with a very thick Scottish accent. It was surreal.
As most foreign speakers interviewed on TV are men male interpreters have argued with the TV stations that they should contract male interpreters to avoid that surreal feeling. Female interpreters retorted that it was better to employ female interpreters because so it would be obvious to even the most distracted viewer that interpretation was being used. TV stations pay very generously, interpreters will try really hard to secure a contract.
I am on the side of the male interpreters on this one. For objective reasons, of course 
if you have not seen it , at the end of Patton he calls a Russian a SOB. Translator says he won’t translate that but Patton insists . Russian guy gets mad and tells his translator to say Patton is also a SOB. Patton says OK, we can drink now. Not sure if that is true scene but sounds like what Patton would say.
I was reading the parallel thread about pun translation and I just wondered how that works for hearing impaired people. If a pun is based on a homophone sound, would your clients have understood it by your gestures? Do the signs reflect the sounds and so show the pun, or would your clients need an additional explanation, which might even be impossible to grasp for someone who does not hear the pun? I would have thought before reading the above mentioned thread that translating a joke from English into American Sign Language would be mostly straight forward: I thought it is the same language (same grammar, same semantics, same syntax…) only expressed through two different “alphabets”; but if puns don’t show in signs then it might be just as difficult as for other languages: if chance is not on your side, you can’t.
Actually ASL is not based on English. It was adapted from a French sign language so is presumably (but I defer to someone better informed) is closer to French. As I mentioned upthread, I once heard a lecture by a deaf linguist on the subject, but he was mostly concerned with making the case that ASL was a fully fledged language with all the complex syntax of any spoken language. But he did mention that learning to read and write English was learning a foreign language.
Oh, I did not know that. Sounds like a pun would then probably be easier to translate from French into ASL than from English. I did not doubt that ASL is a fully fledged language with a syntax as complex as necessary, but I thought it would be mostly parallel to English. Thanks for the information!
ASL has no linguistic relationship to English, other than a few expressions that are essentially loan words; likewise, LSF (French Sign Language) has no relationship to French.
Signed languages do not know borders, nor the expanses of oral languages. ASL is spoken in the US and Canada, and also in much of northern Mexico, but it is not used in education in Mexico. ASL, or a language so close to ASL that they are mutually intelligible, is also used in a variety of countries teachers from the US (often through the Peace Corps) were instrumental in setting up Deaf ed. programs. I know the first Deaf person to be accepted into the Peace Corps, who spent almost 12 (albeit, non-consecutive) years in Deaf ed. with the Peace Corps. She was my Art History teacher at Gallaudet.
As for ASL and other signed languages being mutually intelligible, I was able to easily and comfortably have manual conversations in Costa Rica. There are two additional letters in their alphabet, which I learned (one for the n+tilda, and one for ch), and because my Spanish is pretty good, I could fingerspell. The two letters are from Spanish fingerspelling, which makes me think the signed language used in Spain is probably derived from LSF, as ASL is. This means LSE (Lenguaje de Signos Espana) is passably intelligible with LSF, and therefore with ASL as well.
I once ran into some French Deaf people in DC, and we had a conversation. It was halting, and had a few fits and starts, and also would not have been as successful had I not been able to spell French words (my French grammar is very poor, but I know lots of vocabulary). LSF and ASL separated around 1840, whereas I suspect ASL was exported to Costa Rica no earlier than the establishment of the Peace Corps.
Also, just to further my point, Mexico has its own signed language that is NOT derived from LSF nor LSE. Meanwhile, a number of countries in Southeast Asia use a variety of ASL.
That’s enough. I could write more on why signed languages are not similar to oral languages, but I don’t want this post to be any longer.
Indeed. British Sign Language is also different to ASL, so even having a common written system is no help.
Perhaps I am being pedantic, but it does sound like signed languages are similar to oral languages in terms or variation, regional and cultural differences, etc., rather they are not necessarily related to the oral languages from the region from which they came.
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