My wife was a translator and could never have been an interpreter. That is a much rarer talent. But I suspect the ability to do real-time bidirectional interpretation must surely be extremely rare.
No, it is not really rare. And it can be and is taught and learned. But not everybody can do it, that is correct. Starting from the premise that everybody has a native language, when you translate from that language to another language (usually called your B language or your second language) you are said to do a retour. There are, broadly speaking, two schools or methods of interpretation in use: the one I call the Soviet Method, because it was widely used in the Soviet Union. For meetings between the republics that constituted the union every president of a Soviet Republic could talk his language, say Uzbek or Kasakh. And he (yes, it was usually a man) would be interpreted by his Uzbek or Kasakh interpreters team into Russian, from where the other interpreters teams for the other languages would take his speech and translate it via Russian into their languages. In this example Russian is the Relais language. In our lingo the interpreters in this example are taking relais from a retour. It is a perfectly workable arrangement and in this case all the interpreters work two ways: into and from Russian and their other tongue. What should be avoided for obvious reasons is what is called “double relais”, when one interpreter takes a relais from a booth that is itself taking a relais from a third booth. To prevent that the interpreting consoles have symbols on their displays that show whether the booth we are taking relais from is working directly from the original speaker or is taking relais from another booth.*
The other model is what I call the EU model: every booth is set up in such a way that it covers in and by itself as much languages are spoken in the meeting without having to use relais. That is the task of the Planning Department, and it is not easy for meetings with as much as 23 different languages (those would be the higher ranking meetings, like the Council of Ministers, the Summits of Heads of State and Government or the Plenary Session of the European Parliament). In fact, it is impossible with 23 languages and three interpreters per booth to cover all language combinations without relais (and some retour for the “smaller” or more “exotic” languages like Latvian, Maltese, Estonian, Greek perhaps, Bulgarian… more on that in a moment). But for smaller meetings with only six or eight active languages, a team can be set up that needs no relais. Then for a six language meeting in the EU you woud have six booths, one per language. One of those booths will be the English booth, who will have very little to do all day and bore itself to death, as most of the speeches will be in English. This is very unfortunate: a lot of very good English interpreteres are quitting the EU because of boredom.
When one language is so dominant like the Russian language was in the Soviet Union it is tempting to use the retour system: there is no Russian booth in it, you can spare a team. All the interpreters together make up the Russian booth through retour. The UE is slowly getting partially into that system too, as it is logistically impossible to cover all 23 official languages with a limited number of interpreters. So the interpreters recruited for the “smaller” languages mentioned above are increasingly required to offer a retour, mostly into English, sometimes into German, French or Spanish, so this language can be interpreted. The more retours are offered into English, the less work the English booth has to do, the more bored they get. But there still is an English booth, not like in the Soviet Union, where they could forgo the Russian booth altogether.
This has grown longer than I thought, hope it is at least clear.
* A catastrophic failure is when reciprocous relais is taken, that is, when one booth lacks one language when it is spoken, takes relais from another booth where the interpreter in the first booth expects them to cover that language, but for whatever reason (toilet?) they don’t and happenin turn to try to get their relais from the first booth. Both interpreters only hear each other and have no input from the room at all.
Sheldon Cooper: “Now Navajo!”
Thanks for the very interesting explanation, which I have forwarded to my wife. Although interpretation is very different from translation, she is interested. She feels that the most important quality of a translator is the ability to write well in the target language (as well as knowing the source well). On more that one occasion, the source was not well written and when the translation went back to the client, they modified the source in accordance with her translation. Since the source changed, it came back to her for final revision, but there was nothing to revise, since they had made the source correspond to her translation.
Most people translate into their native language, but the best F–>E translator in her shop was a Swiss Romande, who had come to Canada as a teenager and preferred to go into English. He was a gifted writer and a gifted translator.
But still the interpreter I mentioned was the most astonishing of all. This all happened at the final dinner after and exhausting week in which a committee of 8 decided which Canadian mathematicians got research grants and how much. I think we awarded around 200 and turned down 100. He had to have been a pretty decent mathematician to be on that committee.
Yes, I’m retired now, but worked in GIS for most of my career. But a different aspect of it than you did. I worked on maps and algorithms for car navigation systems. Think devices like Garmin or Tomtom, and later Apple Maps or Google Maps.
Very cool suranyi. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. I mostly manage data and servers now. Another person and I are trying to to convert my 10,000 lines of custom code to an ESRI plug and play. We shall see, but must move forward.
I do the data, she will make the UI. We’ve only found 3 ESRI bugs so far! It’s a new system, so to be expected. I can make data work around them.
Creating a computer curriculum for grades K-8 and implementing it in a lab classroom setting.
Encryption and other forms of secret or hidden communication.
I programmed various encryption algorithms at work, mainly SHA-1 and AES (Rijndael block cipher). I am by no means an encryption expert, but can use the tools and methods of the real mathematicians quite well. I suspect this puts me above 99.9% of the population in ability.
I’ve been fascinated with hidden communications since I was a kid. Spent weekends learning ASL with my best friend in 7th grade so we could “talk” to each other in private. Eventually we developed our own written language so we could pass notes.
“Meet me at the water fountain” in our language would be: “>||-/—\—|–|----_–\/\”. As best I can remember anyway.
This extends to home too. My wife and I have a simple, context dependent private language (she humors me). I can convey “guy beside me looks dangerous and we should leave immediately” within the wording of normal conversation. It’s buried in the phrasing of normal talk, and no one listening would be aware of it. Also hidden in normal phrasing for phone calls: “I’m OK” or “I’m not OK/under duress”, and with the advent of possible AI spoofing, “Yes this is really me”.
We also have our own encryption algorithms (apps) for sending or storing stuff electronically. These were written by me, improved over time, and my latest is likely as good as the downloadable applications (Veracrypt/OpenPGP/etc.) Ours have the added feature of working on two levels, with the higher level requiring non-intuitive and non-sequitur responses to access. It looks like a regular windows app, and someone (say, a laptop thief) could use it to encrypt/decrypt files just fine. But attempting to decrypt our stuff would result in another layer of encryption, with the file marked to prevent further action. This way all our financial info and passwords can travel with us, with no worries about a theft that could result in compromise. FTR: Sometimes we’re gone for months, and need to handle banking/bills/etc. on the road. Yes, I know there are plenty of good encryption apps available, but it’s a DIY hobby for me.
99.9 is a reasonably high standard but I’m pretty confident I meet that for quality management and baseball.
Without going into details, I am a leading expert in an obscure area of Canadian legal history.