Specialists in oral translation services

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

El diablo está en los detalles

Por Pilar García-Crecente, AIB

Que los intérpretes tenemos que estar preparados para cualquier imprevisto ya nos lo advirtió Cristina con sus sabios consejos "decálogo de consejos para el intérprete". Pero hay imprevistos que no lo son tanto y que hacen que el profesional más avezado se sienta en terreno resbaladizo.

Me refiero a esos días en que, después de haber estudiado todas las artes de pesca minuciosamente y los animalillos marinos de tal o cual zona, te atascas con la tramontana, el levante o el gregal, que son el paisaje de quienes te escuchan. O cuando en un seminario sobre una herramienta informática la dificultad estriba en dar con padrón de habitantes, censo o pleno municipal porque resulta que la audiencia está repleta de técnicos de las administraciones locales.

Los intérpretes pretendemos pasar desapercibidos, transformarnos cual camaleones y que la forma en que nos expresamos resulte familiar y reconocible para nuestros oyentes; por eso, además de mantener lubricados nuestros idiomas de trabajo, nos preparamos exhaustivamente para una conferencia, pero ¡el diablo está en los detalles!

Hace pocos días me tocó en suerte la llamada de un cliente habitual que patrocinaba una conferencia muy poco habitual para ellos. A priori, pan comido; un par de horas, como mucho tres, en las que iba a haber interpretación simultánea para cerrar un par de jornadas de trabajo.

La única documentación disponible era el orden del día, en el que aparecía la palabra Euro, que en sí es tranquilizadora porque nos hinchamos a hacer reuniones de economía y finanzas. Ya resultó algo más inquietante, es verdad, lo de “historia monetaria” … Cuando nos pusimos a buscar en internet los nombres de los expertos que aparecían en el escuálido programa, nos encontramos con que eran verdaderas eminencias cuyas publicaciones profundizaban una en el denario romano, otra en los dineros de Carlomagno, en el florín, el ducado o el real de a ocho pasando por los pesos, aleaciones, leyes y paridades diversas a lo largo de toda la historia europea.

¡El susto fue mayúsculo! Para un experto en la circulación monetaria de la Edad Media (pongamos por caso), el contexto histórico, los reyes, la heráldica o la geografía son un paisaje habitual y reconocible que mencionará con naturalidad e inaudita rapidez. ¡Ahí precisamente iba a radicar la dificultad!

Así que las dos intérpretes empezamos a tirar del hilo y a adentrarnos en la inmensidad de ese mundo terminológico de condados, monedas, heráldica, materiales, paridades, pesos y medidas, rutas comerciales y hasta nombres de buques hundidos y piratas. Los artículos publicados por nuestros numismáticos, que encontramos gracias a plataformas como https://www.academia.edu/, nos sumergieron en un contexto plagado de sustantivos con un equivalente estupendo en español y que había que manejar con naturalidad.

Lo de menos fue acostumbrarnos a decir con toda naturalidad ceca cuando hablaban del atelier. Lo complicado fue que Thibaud II tenía que pasar a ser Teobaldo II con toda naturalidad (reconozco que era la primera vez que lo oía mencionar) y Thibaut le Chansonnier era Teobaldo el Trovador y ¡no el del cancionero ni el que cantaba!

Y así llegamos a Pipino el Breve, a Carlos el Calvo, a que Henri le Maladif era Enrique el Doliente y a Felipe el Hermoso, que por cierto ¡no es tan evidente que Philippe le Beau y él fuesen la misma persona y a no confundir con el otro Philippe le Bel! Y, francamente, yo no reconozco en Jacques I d’Aragon a nuestro Jaime I.

Además, la moneda se acuña, se labra, se bate, y en la ceca se usaban cuños, troqueles y ¡sufrideras! Y como quien no quiere la cosa, iban saliendo pueblos, aldeas, minas, ríos, cruzados y cruzadas y cetros o lanzas en los más recónditos vericuetos de la historia y la geografía del momento; todo ello atestado de múltiples latinajos que un solo curso de latín no ayuda a desentrañar…

¡Me parecieron eternos los segundos que tardé en emparejar Il Santo Volto con la Santa Faz y no con la santa cara!

Nuestro oyente debe percibir un lenguaje, una terminología, que reconoce y le resulta familiar para así prestar atención a lo que realmente le importa; por eso los intérpretes pasamos mucho tiempo leyendo y escuchando todo cuanto podemos, por eso nos volvemos locos pidiendo documentación para prepararnos. Debe de resultar sumamente incómodo estar escuchando a un intérprete que pasa de puntillas por los aledaños de su campo de especialización provocándole, como poco, una sonrisa benevolente con sus deslices.

¡No creo que los expertos de nuestra conferencia puedan imaginar la cantidad de horas que hicieron falta para preparar aquellas 2 horitas de reunión!

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Alternative Views

By Hugo Pooley, AIB





How often does one find that an individual, a class, nay a whole society… holds that there is only one right way to do a certain thing? TINA, There Is No Alternative, as Maggie Thatcher used to say. The tea must be poured into the cup before the milk (or perhaps conversely). Men cannot wear skirts; their shoes must be black; socks must be worn with sandals. No se debe nunca cortar la tortilla con cuchillo. My country, right or wrong. Financial institutions shall certify details of transactions for submission to the taxman…

And the funny thing – one learns as one travels – is that each place´s only right way is different to the others! Tax rules are a particularly rich area of illustrations.

In Swift´s “Gulliver´s Travels”, the Big-Endian/Little-Endian controversy - between those in favour of breaking boiled eggs at one end or the other - reflects British quarrels over religion.

When you grow up - for example – as a little Brit on that “small island” permeated with the spirit of good old subject-verb-object - the missionary position of word orders - and a healthy distrust of all things continental. And then start to learn French at school and are introduced to the concept of noun genders. To such a candid soul there is nothing intrinsically feminine about a door or a shoe: imagine the turmoil these continental revelations unleash in the fervid imagination of a 12-year-old! Mind already slightly broadened.

Then comes, say, the study of German: masculine, feminine and neutral; verb at the end of the sentence… WTF! Later Spanish, with two alternative words for – concepts of – the verb ´to be´, and a sentence can be arranged in almost any order… more like a grammatical Kama Sutra. Then perhaps Portuguese: hey, we´ll just swallow half the sounds and are telling you it´s perfectly reasonable to insert a particle, such as an object, in the middle of a verb, between its stem and ending: dar-to-ia.

Not to mention the weird and wonderful phenomena at play in more exotic languages… The end result has to be considerable mind expansion. In such a way that one begins to perceive that The Other may have a point, there may after all be more than one way to skin a cat: there´s no intrinsic reason why the salt cellar should be the one with a single hole in the cap, maybe gay marriage could be acceptable, perhaps it´s good to eat with one´s hands, why not mark the conservative-voting constituencies in red not blue, indeed perhaps a different electoral system would be fairer?

Mind thus blown… I don´t know if there are many intolerant left-wing bigots in our beloved profession, but submit that pursuant to the considerations above, there are not many closed-minded right-wing ones.




Friday, October 27, 2017

Eugeni Xammar: a journalist, adventurer… and sometime interpreter

By Felix Ordeig, AIB


Over the last summer I read a very enjoyable book:  “Seixanta anys d’anar pel món” (Sixty years a wandering),a chatty biography of quite a striking figure, Eugeni XAMMAR, a self-taught and self made adventurer, journalist, polyglot, unofficial diplomat, translator and yes – a sometime interpreter. I had by chance come across a TV programme on his life and became interested in finding out more about him – and so, on seeing this book staring at me in Abacus a few months later, I bought it on impulse, despite its 500- plus pages.

The book, first published in 1991 and recently re-edited, is written in Catalan, which probably means it won’t get much of a wide diffusion, which is a pity, as despite its length it is on the whole an entertaining and informative read. It is full of vivid testimonies and recollections of key historical events in the first half of last century, including both the Great War and the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany and its terrible aftermath, including the troubled times in Spain. It takes the form of a long conversation toward the end of his life (he passed away in his mid-eighties in 1973) with his lifelong friend and confidant, Josep Badia, who recorded Xammar’s memoirs and years later, must have gathered his notes and found a willing publisher.

Because more than 40 years have gone by since his death, his name has never been that familiar even within his own country, partly because he died when Spain was still a dictatorship, which had no wish whatsoever to keep alive - let alone honour - the memory of someone who, having been a vocal opponent of the Franco regime in the past, lived his last years in internal exile. Other reasons stand out: aside from his writings as a journalist and foreign correspondent in the 20’s and 30’s, this is his only book, and though he was born and died in a small sleepy town north of Barcelona, he spent most of his adult life abroad, mainly in Germany, France and Switzerland. All of the above may explain why Josep Pla, probably one of the greatest prose writers in the Catalan language - and  who as a young budding journalist in Germany in the 1920’s looked up to Xammar as a mentor and role model – was far better known.

But I digress. These blog posts are supposed to be about interpreting, however tangentially, right? And I am supposed to discuss Xammar’s facet as one-of-us. I had heard a fair bit about his career as an interpreter, supposedly at the WHO in Geneva, and had even tried to dig up some information on his time there, to no avail. In fact Xammar, in his book, defines himself first and foremost as a journalist and foreign correspondent, and I was disappointed at the paucity of references in his book to our profession – he clearly saw it as an ancillary activity, amusing and even stimulating, an example of his immense curiosity but by no means central to his life’s endeavours.

Xammar came from a humble background but, as a determined, confident and smartly intelligent young man who refused to accept his destiny as an accounting clerk with a textile firm in Barcelona, managed to befriend members of the Catalan intelligentsia in the years prior to the Great War, learnt French, English and then German and, thanks to his contacts, started working as a journalist and, thanks to his languages, became a correspondent on the Western front and never really looked back. Judging by his book, he must have been an excellent, amusing and observant journalist. His comments are always insightful, incisive and ironic; in the book, he sometimes does beat his own drum but is aware almost in the same breath that he has gone over the top and makes a rueful self-deprecating remark as a clear and healthy sign of not taking oneself too seriously. For anyone with an interest in Catalan, Spanish and European recent history, what is very enjoyable is that the book is peppered with brief albeit pithy portraits of many famous politicians, intellectuals, literary and public figures of his time- in terms of sheer name-dropping terms it reminds one of Stefan Zweig’s memoirs.

For many years, he was a correspondent for prestigious Catalan and Spanish newspapers (“La Publicitat”, “La Veu de Catalunya”and “El Sol”). He alternated this work with translating assignments and also occasionally in the press services of the post-Versailles international organizations, namely the League of Nations, where he was posted in the early 1920’s – the reader is reminded that all proceedings in plenary were interpreted in full consecutive mode into English and French, and he remarks mordantly on how tedious this was for participants and observers, since the majority of delegates were familiar with both languages, so strictly unnecessary. But interpretation was mandatory for statutory and diplomatic reasons, and Xammar hints at how demoralizing this must have been for interpreters, in particular as people ignored them and chatted with each other whilst they did their work: sounds unfortunately familiar to some of us…

After World War II –which he spent in the sleepy southern French town of Perpignan - Xammar managed to get translating work from UNESCO and was asked in 1950 to help out with interpreting at a six-week long conference of that organization in Florence, even though he had zero experience. Reading his description of the utter panic upon entering the booth, which led to him being tongue-tied: it rang so true and reminded me vividly of the stressful, cold-sweat-inducing stage fright I felt as a novice interpreter in my first meetings at the European Commission. However, his memories show a certain chutzpah, self-confidence bordering on arrogance: he claims that on day two he seized the microphone from his colleague and plunged in from the deep end, and managed to do a reasonable job and that by the end of the conference not only had he got the knack of simultaneous interpreting but was a master at his new found trade…of course we only have his word to go by, as in those pre-AIIC days there was little professional due diligence and quality control as we now know it.

After a stint as a staff translator at the UN in New York in the early fifties, which from all accounts he much enjoyed, he returned to Europe and ended up working as a free lance translator at several Geneva-based UN agencies and likewise as a f/l interpreter at the WHO (but as I said I have been unable to find any trace of his passage there). In any case, he mentions his career as a translator far more often and therein lies the suspicion that either he wasn’t really that keen on interpreting or that he found it boring (or that he wasn’t that good at it, after all). Maybe it is because interpreters can’t really be in the limelight and he certainly seemed to enjoy being a protagonist in life – at least that is the impression one gets from his memoirs.

As an anecdote, he does mention his encounter with an old Anglo-German acquaintance, Paul Smith, who had acted as an interpreter between Hitler and Franco at their famous meeting in a railway carriage in Hendaye, on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940, and who was seeking a publisher for his memoirs in the post-war years. I won’t go into details, but it is interesting to read the description of such a momentous event from a fly-on-the wall perspective, so to speak.


I will conclude this piece by strongly recommending this book (Quaderns Crema), more because Xammar was a prescient and gifted journalist rather than for his insights on our profession. Of special and topical interest for those of us living through troubled times in Catalonia right now are his sceptical yet insightful views on the advent of the Spanish Republic in 1931, the failed declaration of independence by Catalan leader Lluís Companys on 6th October 1934 and of course the tragic events of the Spanish Civil War, during which despite his doubts he remained staunchly loyal to the Republican side in the conflict.