by Gio Lester on Friday, February 17, 2012
Now that you have an idea of how to attach value to your time and activity, it is time to figure out how to best use banking and government tools to determine your taxes. No, this is not an accounting course. Relax and enjoy.
In my first venture in the NAJIT blog I discussed earning an income – how to determine the value of our time and sweat. But we all know that after we earn it, we have to pay our share to the government. In my country, its IRS counterpart is affectionately called “The Lion.”
I believe in paying income tax, but I don’t want to pay more than my fair share, and it’s up to me to make the best use of the tools available to me for calculating what is due when reporting my income.
It is very important to learn as much as possible about income tax return forms and/or use a competent accountant. Your accountant should understand that you are a business, your allowable deductions based on the type of business you are (sole proprietorship, LLC, P.A., etc.), and the impact your state’s laws will also have on the final return.
I am a freelancer in the State of Florida, and not incorporated – sole proprietorship works for me. Every year I have to fill out Schedule C, I have to submit an expense report to my accountant so he can help ensure that I pay the right amount of income tax and that I have used all my allowances. There is one aspect of the IRS return I don’t quite agree with: I am supposed to pay quarterly taxes based on a projected income. Yeah, right.
My Expense Report is divided into accounts:
_ Travel/Entertainment – gas, meals, hotel expenses, etc.
_ Marketing – gifts to clients, business cards, website related expenses (not ISP charges)
_ Office Expenses – ISP charges, equipment, supplies
_ Utilities – a portion of one’s house total for the year or one’s office actual annual electric bill, cell phone, fax, business dedicated line
_ Healthcare – dental, pharmacy, consultations, medical insurance
_ Education – conference registrations, seminars, books
_ Mail – stamps, envelopes
_ Salary – the check you write to yourself every month (or so we’d like)
_ Rent – I work from home, but according to the IRS, because I have a room dedicated as office space, I am allowed a deduction based on its square footage. Check your situation with your accountant or you can read the instruction on the IRS.gov website.
There are accounting programs available to help you set up your company’s accounting, such as QuickBooks by Intuit, but an MS Excel spreadsheet will work just as well. Make sure to identify the account (Marketing), history (business cards), total ($$$), month (Jan2012) if you are not using a program that automatically prompts you for that information. Most banks nowadays allow you to append information to your statement line items before you download your monthly statement directly into your accounting program. That is a tool we should all make use of.
Your accountant may point out to you that you need to pay yourself a salary, set up a Social Security account for compulsory deductions, etc. These are very easy to do and have helped
me navigate the uncertainties of our business much better. Before, I would deposit all my income in my personal account. Now I have an account just for my business and I write myself a check every month, which I deposit in my personal account. My annual subscriptions, professional purchases, membership fees, etc. are also paid from that account. And I try to leave the estimated Social Security deductions and IRS return amount in my business account – from which I will write my IRS return check.
Some of you may think that since your account is not a joint account it is permissible to commingle funds. Well, not really. My accountant explained to me that transactions that are not business related should not appear in your business account statement. Your grocery bill, non-business restaurant expenses and Aunt Sally’s birthday check (incoming, but not a business-related income) are examples of inappropriate entries into a business account.
If you are like me and lack the required discipline to create and send invoices timely, there is a not-so-new type of device available that may assist those not comfortable with payment collection facilities such as PayPal. I am referring to mobile payment devices that can be attached to your phone for processing credit card and electronic check payments. That is a way 
of processing payments quickly, they go straight into your bank account and you eliminate the need for invoices: you can issue receipts that are sent directly to your clients. The devices allow for different forms of input (manual entry or swipe) and the charges vary accordingly. You may want to check Corduro (www.corduro.com), Square Up (www.squareup.com), PaymentMax (http://www.paymentmax.com/), and Intuit’s GoPayment (http://payments.intuit.com/products/basic-payment-solutions/mobile-credit-card-processing.jsp). It is also a good way of avoiding the Payment-in-the-mail Syndrome that is affecting some of our clients.
Any questions? Your accountant should be happy to help you with them.
by Jennifer De La Cruz on Friday, February 10, 2012
In honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day celebration let’s take a moment to examine how we interpreters and translators can continue to stay deeply in love with our professions.
As a staffer at a busy courthouse and a moonlighting translator, you would think that by the time I have any free moment I’d want to gel and stare into space just to get my thoughts together. I mean, who in their right mind voluntarily takes a weekend to attend seminars all day when they could take distance learning from the comfort of their own homes to get the required continuing education units? I’ll tell you who: language professionals. There’s something that we have in our hard-wiring, perhaps our very genetic makeup that seems to make it impossible to pass up any chance to learn! Even after the most grueling day, my colleagues and I are just waiting for quittin’ time when, out of nowhere, somebody mentions a term. The room lights up with intelligent, energetic discourse and we suddenly find that once again, our love for the profession has been reignited. All that said, it can still be very easy to fall into a rut and forget to fan the flames of this love if we are in an isolated environment or have pretty much the same routine terminology come up day after day.
“As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” — Socrates
Even after some 15 years in the profession, and over half my life knowing a second language, instead of feeling like I am even close to completing my learning, I realize there is still infinite knowledge that I need to obtain. This will come in the form of experience, naturally, but it is also my responsibility to actively seek out learning opportunities. Ancient philosophy has taught us that the more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t know. Applied to the profession of interpreting and translation, the fascinating worlds we work in are only as interesting as we make them by absorbing what we are transferring between languages and finding something interesting to delve into a little deeper.
“You learn something every day if you pay attention.” —Ray LeBlond
How can we take a routine and shake it up a little, and continue to love what we do? One way is to pay closer attention to what we’re doing and what’s happening around us. Maybe there’s a word or phrase for which we can find a different rendition. Perhaps it’s a matter of really taking that one term in a translation and spending just ten extra minutes researching a little deeper. It may even be actively reading a publication that relates to our work in some fashion, taking a particularly difficult sentence and trying to untangle it to put it in another language. There are opportunities all around us! Even simpler than all this is the realization that we’ve chosen a profession that doesn’t have to end when we go home for the day. We live surrounded by at least one language (hopefully two!) every day of our lives, and that’s fertile ground for our learning. Even listening to how our kids speak “teenager” is an opportunity to think of how we would express that in another language. It can be quite an interesting and fun task, and it’s just one reminder of why we love what we do.
“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” —Abigail Adams
It can be very easy to rest on our accreditations and forget that we must continue to learn all the time, and not just when we’ve got continuing education to submit to the powers that be. Conferences and seminars are my preference for continued growth. They’re such an excellent way to not only connect with other professionals, but also to discover new topics or different ways of handling tasks. It’s an environment where we are surrounded by like-minded individuals and the air can become alive with the electricity of brain power from everyday people. I have yet to attend a conference or seminar professionally where I felt anything but awe when I realized how many people have the same passions, the same struggles and the same thirst for knowledge that I do! To top it all off, during breaks at interpreter events it’s easy to walk around a room and get to know people from all language pairs, making new friends you’ll probably see at a future event. If you’re in a remote area where conferences and seminars are hard to come by, even taking on a distance learning course among a few colleagues can be invigorating! The more we can do our best to enjoy continuing education, the more likely we will be to keep seeking out great opportunities, or maybe even start saving up for the big national conference of our favorite professional organization! I guarantee you’ll love what you do even more when you commit to great educational events.
You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give. —Winston Churchill
Volunteerism is yet another way to keep the spark alive in our love for our work. Although participation at in-person events is one of the biggest commitments we can make as volunteers, there are countless ways to get involved now that we are in the computer age. Your favorite professional organization or chapter most undoubtedly has a newsletter, a website, a blog or some other social media where your two cents can really count. Even if you can’t take on a big role in one of these endeavors, your sense of commitment to the career can become even deeper by lending a willing hand. If you have the opportunity to attend a conference or seminar, contact the organizers and see if they need some helpers, and I bet that event will become more meaningful. Even something as simple as a mentoring relationship is a win-win for new and seasoned interpreters alike, because both learn and contribute to the others’ learning. In short, this is our profession, one that we love very much, and our proven ability to excel when we work alone is boundless when we have the opportunity to work together.
“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”—Hebbel
Whether you call it love, passion or simply enjoying your career, I think we can all agree that having a true calling and affinity for this profession is rewarded every day. For some, staying involved and actively seeking out opportunities for growth is easy, for others it may require more effort. No matter where we find ourselves on our career path, taking the time to really look at what we do to keep that passion alive is worth the time, and should be a commitment we all make. This year, I think I’ll make my career my Valentine.
by Katharine Allen on Friday, February 3, 2012
Translation and Interpreting: Separate Professions or One and the Same?
The Supreme Court and the interpreting profession weigh in on the answer, but they may have to agree to disagree.
By Barry S. Olsen and Katharine Allen
Seasoned interpreters and experienced translators alike are keenly aware of the different skill sets required for interpreting and translation. Both activities are included under the broader category of “language services” and have the basic purpose of transferring meaning from one language to another. As the 2010 Interpreting Marketplace Survey demonstrated, most interpreters are also translators and surely many translators have at times interpreted. Furthermore, hybrid activities performed by interpreters and translators, such as sight translation and transcription bridge the written and oral aspects of language to convey meaning from source to target languages. But does that mean that interpreting and translation are the same profession? A fair question, to be sure.
When it comes to acquiring formal expertise in either discipline, few, if any, would dispute that they require separate, specialized training–the core of what defines a profession. Two years of training in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting and sight translation do not a translator make. Similarly, years of study to master converting written text from one language to another does not an interpreter make.
But perhaps the more relevant question is, does it matter whether they are separate professions or not? And who should answer that question: Interpreters and translators—those who exercise these professions—or the Supreme Court of the United States?
In January, InterpretAmerica published Interpreting: Full Speed Ahead, Blazing a Trail Towards National Unity. The document, authored by Marjory Bancroft, is a summary of 5 professional identity workgroups held at the 2nd North American Summit on Interpreting in June 2011. Some 150 interpreters, language service providers, technology providers, association presidents, educators, trainers and researchers across the profession met and hashed out their views on 5 topics central to interpreting: professional associations; certification; training and education; legal/advocacy; and technology. (To download, go to www.interpretamerica.net/publications).
To the surprise of many, a thorough study of the discussions revealed a high degree of consensus, regardless of whether participants came from conference or community interpreting, or were professional association leaders or language service providers. Specifically, most want a single umbrella professional association to represent interpreting. Most want a generalist entry-level interpreter certification. And most think technology must be better integrated into and embraced by the profession.
One conclusion from the discussion was clear—those involved in interpreting definitely see it as a profession distinct from any other, with all the same requirements and components as any profession, such as medicine, journalism, or teaching.
So how does the United States Supreme Court figure into this discussion? On February 21, 2012, the highest court of the land will hear arguments in Kouichi Taniguchi vs. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd to answer the question of “whether costs incurred in translating written documents are “compensation of interpreters” for purposes of 28 U.S.C. § 1920(6).”
This case concerns the definition of the term “interpreters” in 28 U.S.C. § 1920(6), which permits the taxing of the “compensation of interpreters” as costs in the federal courts. The parties dispute the definition of the term “interpreter” under this statute, and whether “interpreter” should be limited to oral services (as Petitioner argues), or encompass written document translation services as well (as Respondent argues). 1
The specific case, and the section or U.S. Code referenced, might be over money, but the question it poses strikes at the heart of the relatively new and still fragile infrastructure both interpreting and translation have built in the United States.
We all know that confusion and ignorance about translation and interpreting abound. Indeed, the lack of awareness about what we do is so profound that even the 9th Circuit Court decision of this case, on appeal now before the Supreme Court, relied upon dictionary definitions to justify lumping the two activities under one category. And in recent professional listserv discussions reacting to this case, highly respected colleagues have argued the blurring of the lines between the two, especially when it comes to what we are actually asked to do in the workplace versus what we are trained for.
If the Supreme Court sides with the view that there is no fundamental difference between the two activities, where does that leave interpreting and translation as professions? What do we say to the many who are working to raise quality standards, define training standards, and establish both generalist and specialist certifications? How do medical, legal and community interpreter trainers teach limits around whether and when they should translate written discharge instructions, consent forms or complex legal and medical documents? What basis will we have for determining proper wage and workplace agreements, if the highest court in the land decides there is no fundamental difference between translation and interpreting?
On the other hand, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the petitioner’s view that “compensation of interpreters” does not include written document translation, does that mean we can finally put to rest the argument about whether they are fundamentally two separate activities? And does this mean that there will be legal precedent to cite when explaining the difference between translation and interpreting? Or will rapid technological advances make the distinction between written and spoken communication a moot point?
Only time will tell. Amicus briefs have been filed by translators and interpreters in support of both the petitioner and the respondent. Links to these briefs are available at www.interpretamerica.net/publications. You can conduct your own review of the arguments pro and con as we await what will surely become a seminal verdict for our profession(s).
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1 Brief of Amicus Curiae: Interpreting and Translation Professors in Support of Petitioner, Kouichi Taniguchi Vs. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd, Supreme Court Of The United States, p 17.
by Kathleen on Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time Management for Free-Lancers: A Primer
After reading my colleague Gio Lester’s informative blog last week (How Much Is My Time Worth?), you know how to put a dollar value on your time. Now how do you make it pay? How do you learn to manage your time efficiently to accomplish all you need to get done? And boy, do we have a lot to get done. Like most self-employed folks, we free-lance interpreters must divide our time between getting work, training for work, preparing for work, organizing work, actually doing work and maintaining accounts for the work. Oh, and then we must squeeze in some time to spend with family, take care of household chores, work on personal finances, sleep and (gasp!) manage to put aside a little time for ourselves. It ain’t easy, but we can do it with good planning and a positive attitude.
Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a novice interpreter who looked a lot like me. (So all right, it is me). Newly certified, she was glad to escape the 9 to 5 treadmill and jump into the exciting world of free-lance interpreting. Anxious to make good, she took every job offered, and ended up hurrying hither and yon, often arriving to an assignment late, and sometimes (horrors!) not at all. She realized that after many years of working according to a set schedule, she had absolutely no time management skills. So one day, she said to myself, “Enough! I am fed up with overbooking myself; I am sick of running around like a chicken with its head cut off; I am tired of living stressed out. I must and will get myself organized.”
Well, my first step was to part reluctantly with my beautiful, but clunky, tooled leather Day Runner, check out new technology and learn to use it to my advantage. IT cannot solve all your scheduling woes, however. It really all starts with you. Here are my tips for making the most of one’s time. I have attached some online primers on time management as well, but this is what works for me.
1. Make schedules and prioritized lists. I don’t care if you’re “just not a list maker.” Make yourself do it. You’ll thank me later.
2. Make sure your scheduling is realistic; in other words, be careful with overbooking, and don’t take risky chances. If you schedule a preliminary hearing in the morning and you are not sure how long it will take, think twice about accepting that 1:00 deposition. If you know you will be too tired out after interpreting three hours at night court, don’t accept an 8:30 arraignment. Don’t worry, more assignments will come your way, and, believe it or not, it all balances out. Also keep in mind the fact that it is unethical to make commitments you may not be able to fulfill.
3. Try to keep to your schedule. Let’s say you had some interpreting work in the morning and early afternoon, and you had reserved the rest of the afternoon for some necessary shopping. Then someone emails you at 11:00 to see if you can fit in an assignment at 3:30. Make a careful evaluation of your priorities. Which is more important–getting that perfect birthday gift for your significant other or making a couple of bucks?
4. If you have a tough trial or deposition coming up, get the information you need to prep, and schedule some time to read it through. Don’t just wing it. Nobody flies that well.
5. Invest in dependable electronic communications equipment with internet access, and keep it with you at all times. At the risk of looking like one of those people glued to their smart phone, you need to know when a nice juicy assignment comes your way. Make sure your calendar is always up to date.
6. Always, always give yourself enough time to get to an assignment. Part of your daily planning should be to find out how long a trip will take. If your assignment is someplace you’ve never been before, do your research. With Mapquest and GPS systems, there is really no excuse for getting lost on the way. Whiny explanations to the person who contracted your services just make you look unprofessional.
7. Every night before you go to bed, review your schedule for the following day. Try to watch yourself traveling through the day. It’s a new journey, and you want to make it a good one. Do the same at the beginning of every week.
8. Get off to a good start. Get up in plenty of time to have breakfast, dress nicely, check email and generally clear the decks for action. Give yourself plenty of time to drive to your destination in safety. Yeah, yeah, I know, you don’t do mornings—but it’s so good for you, and will make you feel like you own the world!
9. If your day is going to be a full one, pack a lunch; you may not have time to stop someplace. A hungry interpreter cannot focus on the task at hand.
10. Be prepared to handle phone calls about new work from your car. Get hands-free equipment, of course, but don’t attempt to memorialize the assignment right then and there. If you can, pull over and get the information. If not, don’t try to check your schedule or input times and dates as you’re driving along. Explain your situation and tell the person you’ll get back to them as soon as possible, or ask them to send an email or leave a message you can respond to later. If they want you, they’ll wait a half hour. Remember–no assignment is worth sacrificing your life or the lives of others.
11. Log all completed assignments daily. Every day when you get home, input all the pertinent information in the designated file of the computer program you have selected for this purpose. If you have received payments that day, log them on as well. Send out any invoices. If you wait until the weekend or (heaven forbid!) the end of the month, that’s that much less time you have to spend with family and friends.
12. This last is an essential step for me. It’s kind of like an examination of conscience. Before I go to sleep, I ask myself: “Did I get done what I needed to get done and in the way I had intended? What unexpected things happened to get me off track? Did I handle them well?” And this is the single most important thing: “What did I learn today about managing my time and about myself? What changes can I make?”
Just one more thing. Remember that what you do reflects back on the rest of us interpreters. If you are chronically late, we all seem unreliable. If you show up at court looking like you just rolled out of bed, we all appear somewhat rumbled. Be professional. Be ethical. Get out there and do us proud.
Articles
“Time Management: Tips to Reduce Stress and Improve Productivity”
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/time-management/wl00048
“How to Develop Good Time Management Skills”
http://www.freelance-work-guide.com/time-management-skills.html.
“The Ten Commandments of Time Management”
http://theselfemploymentcoach.net/the-ten-commandments-of-time-management/
Videos
English cartoon—Time Management
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40r7_IUKTN0&feature=related
Work Smart—How to Write a To-Do List
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjKuoeYP5A&feature=related
Mad TV—Time Manager
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amAEJGVBMvU&feature=related
by Gio Lester on Friday, January 20, 2012
Translators and interpreters are a very creative bunch, and creative folk usually do not make good administrators. Yes, it is a generalization, so take it with the duly recommended grain of salt.
We have all heard of ROI (Return on Investment). That is what you get back for the money you are investing in your business – the cost of equipment, marketing, training, education, etc. The latest technological developments in our industry have turned this concept upside down: we are investing more and more in training, software and faster equipment to improve the quality of our product, and our clients want us to charge less.
How can we find the happy medium? That comes from knowing what our time is worth and adding a cushion to our rates so we can accommodate our clients’ needs without hurting our bottom line. Our main weapon is, as always, knowledge: of basic accounting, contract language, time management, office administration and negotiation tactics.
Let’s start with some basic accounting concepts.
A colleague of mine once said that the right price for your services is by nature different from the right price for my services. And that is so because we have different financial needs and our pricing structure should be based on that.
Basically, what I pay for paper, ink cartridges, software, internet service, power, etc. may be different from what you pay. To these and other quantifiable tangibles we add quality, dependability, knowledge and other quantifiable intangibles. Since our operating expenses are different, then it is only logical that the final product will also be priced differently.
Step one in determining the value of my time is to identify my operating expenses and determine how much they cost me. Examples of these expenses are taxes, ink cartridges, paper, power, cell phone, software (new and upgrades), books, health insurance, Social Security contributions, travel expenses, registration at conferences, membership dues, marketing, etc.
Step two is determining how much I want to earn a year and how much time I want to toil to reach that amount. The easy calculation is: you pick a dollar amount (desired income-DI) and divide it by 52 (the number of weeks in a year.) Then, divide that result by the number of hours you want to work in a week.
a) [DI]/[52] = $ per week
b) [$/Week]/[ h/week] = $ per hour
Now my operating expenses come into play. I have to take that value into consideration to ensure that [ $/hour] covers my cost of doing business, my salary and also includes a cushion (profit).
That cushion is very important. That is the amount I can use to negotiate rates with customers.
To make it easy, let’s say that my expenses equal 50% of my hourly wages – that is the portion of my earnings I cannot negotiate. The balance should cover my wage and profit. In my case, I’d say that ¼ of that balance represents my profit – and I can play with that number to meet my clients’ needs.
Remember that values will vary from market to market – both based on geographical and industry variables, as well as from professional to professional. Your cost of doing business may represent less than 50% of your hourly wage; your profit margin may be greater than 25%. Regardless of the values, your profit margin is the number you can reduce as you see fit to guarantee that you get the job.
So, we have roughly covered Basic Accounting. Next time, Basic Accounting II.
by Jennifer De La Cruz on Friday, January 13, 2012
Finding a Place Between Worlds
Breaking into the world of interpreting and gaining acceptance as somebody who learned Spanish in college and beyond has been a quite a journey in self-discovery. Although I’ve learned the language and culture well enough to succeed as an interpreter, the fact is that I will never be like those around me who, being either heritage or native speakers, are naturally part of the Spanish-speaking culture. What a difficult realization to come to, and yet I don’t think it’s necessarily a unique experience.
Although it’s always been a lot of fun to liken my life to the cultural encounters in movies such as Spanglish and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, for a long time it was a heavy burden when people around me would point out that I was different from them. When first learning Spanish, it was no surprise that cultural references or plays on words would slip by me. Despite the hard work in learning all of the ins and outs I possibly could, there came a point when I realized that I will never be able to close the gap between my two worlds. To add insult to injury, I found myself in a place where it didn’t feel like I was a full-fledged member of either one! Now that’s heavy.
Having come to that conclusion, I found myself analyzing what got me there in the first place. I think at first, my trying to “find myself” as a young adult coincided with the beginning of my integration into a new culture. I mean, here I was trying to learn a new way of speaking and living, and I hadn’t even really matured and fully learned about my mono-cultural self yet! Later came the trials and tribulations of integrating into my new family by marriage. That’s difficult enough, but add in that the group was large and recently immigrated to the US, and you have the perfect storm for feelings like I just couldn’t get the culture thing right.
In the world of professional interpreting, I found myself the minority yet again. Many colleagues of mine grew up in the United States speaking Spanish and are bicultural, and many grew up in a Spanish-speaking country and immigrated here as adults. My desire to have all the wonderful language and cultural knowledge they had was overwhelming, and seemed to be my duty as a good interpreter. Gosh, can’t a girl catch a break?
I wonder whether this experience is similar to that of people whose physical features or background come with an expectation to speak perfect Spanish, but they don’t. Maybe there’s a burden carried by immigrants who try to blend in, and yet they’re continually reminded about their foreign accent or the different foods in their lunchboxes. Come to think of it, we all have something that makes us different… no—that makes us unique! Now we’re getting somewhere!
After all, looking at the struggles I endured as a young adult, as a new interpreter, the moments when I felt inadequate, all of it continues to be wonderfully balanced by the joys of learning different perspectives, and getting to know a rich variety of people from far away that I might never have otherwise met. All of it, without exception, makes me examine myself, my ways of thinking, and see the world from a different point of view.
When I look at the whole picture, the reality is I’m not living some unique experience at all; I’m living the human experience. It took a while, but what I’ve learned is that rather than carrying the burden of attempting to transform, my goal is to continue to add to who I am, striving always to learn more about the language and culture of my work. As an interpreter, I’m expected to flow back and forth between both worlds, and life has had its way of placing me right in the middle, despite my push to be on the Spanish side.
Indeed, I learned to embrace the fact that I won’t get all the plays on words in my second language, I won’t always know the best cultural remedy, and my accent will be a little funny sometimes. There will always be something I don’t know, and I may stick out like a sore thumb in family portraits, but I like to think I’m enriching those around me with my unique life experiences. Nope, I didn’t grow up bicultural, or bilingual, and I’m now completely content knowing that my culture is neither from here nor from there, but from my heart and my life. And in the end, that’s pretty cool.
Check out these links for further thoughts on Cultural Identity and Multiculturalism:
http://www.digitrends.com/crossingcultures/iden.htm
http://www.mediate.com/articles/adler3.cfm
by NFestinger on Friday, January 6, 2012
The Coaching Model: Applicable to Interpreters?
I had a colonoscopy the other day. As I was getting prepped in the operating room, I saw a big sign that said TIME OUT. I asked the nurse about it. “When the doctor comes in, before we do anything, we all stop to make sure it is the right patient, check the date of birth, and state aloud what the procedure is.” “Is that a procedure you adopted from the checklist doctor?” I asked. “Oh, no,” the anesthesiologist said, “we’ve been doing it for a few years.” The nurse was more forthcoming. “Can you imagine, going into the hospital and having the wrong procedure done!” she remarked.
Medical error was once the elephant in the room that no one discussed. Doctors were white-coat wonders whose judgment was beyond question, whose actions were questioned only by the ignorant or uneducated. Nurses had more day-to-day contact with patients, and they may have noticed irregularities, voiced complaints or suggested procedural improvements, but then, who paid attention to them? The medical establishment is an authority hierarchy, heavily doctor-oriented. Since hospitals also have an interest in down-playing adverse outcomes, medical error was not a subject often addressed, except in lawsuits.
Happily, times have changed. Over the past decades, several doctors have begun an active practice of writing on health issues and ethics, directed not at medical specialists but at the general reader. In the pages of The New Yorker and in online publications such as Slate, doctors are discussing issues of aging and hospice care, AIDS and cancer treatment options, the difficulty of discussing terminal cases with families, and other once-taboo subjects.
Dr. Atul Gawande (www. Gawande.com) is one of the new crop of doctor-writers. (Jerome Groopman is another.) Dr. Gawande published a book called The Checklist Manifesto in 2009. In it the author, a young surgeon and professor, analyzed medical error and adverse outcomes in hospitals, and suggested the seemingly simple solution of a checklist for medical personnel to adopt and follow as a matter of routine. After a suggested surgical checklist began to be used routinely (including simple things like a reminder to wash hands), hospital error rates plummeted.
In the October 3, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, Gawande wrote a piece called Personal Best, tackling another medical taboo—the idea that surgeons know everything they need to know and don’t welcome second-guessing. Intrigued by the prevalence of coaching in many fields, Dr. Gawande at age 45 wondered whether a coach in the operating room would be effective in helping his surgical technique. He had been on the job for 8 years and felt he was at a plateau. His article reviews the coaching model as used by concert musicians, teachers, and in sports, and since this is one doctor with an open mind, he decided to try it himself. He asked a former professor and surgical specialist to observe him during surgery and take notes, then they had a discussion.
It turned out that small details made a world of difference: the way the patient was draped, the position of the surgeon’s elbows, the angle of the light. “The one twenty-minute discussion [after the surgical observation] gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years,” Dr. Gawande writes. He has continued to work with his coach in the preparatory phases and during surgery itself. Once the coach was present during a surgical procedure that went slightly awry, causing Dr. Gawande some embarrassment. In his discussions with other surgeons, he has not heard resounding endorsement of the coaching model. He realizes that regardless of its effectiveness as a learning tool, patients would naturally be uncomfortable with the idea of their doctor needing a coach. As he notes, “The existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?”
Most impressive to me in all this was that a surgeon initiated a coaching experiment in his own practice and found it helpful. It made me wonder whether this is the model we need to consider to improve interpreter performance as well. For example, I have taught interpreting techniques to interpreters of languages I don’t speak, and when I do this, I have often felt more like a coach than a teacher: I try to impart pragmatic courtroom awareness, attitude toward the work, listening techniques, an understanding of ethical limits, an assortment of mental tricks, and general encouragement so that trainees understand what is involved in the whole process of simultaneous. Otherwise they may get prematurely discouraged. People are more able to learn new skills when exercises such as lag, Cloze, and shadowing are presented in a relaxed, supportive, non-threatening manner.
Some years ago, NAJIT tried to establish a mentoring program, which never got off the ground. Perhaps we need to be looking at a one-on-one coaching model. If surgeons can expose their work to other experts, why can’t we? Even expert interpreters can always improve their performance. Being open to discussion with peers is a good start. And a fine next step is recognizing that the coaching model can be applicable to us.
by Robin Lanier on Wednesday, October 19, 2011
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