Sometimes, words just don’t cut it. As interpreters, we often have to rely on facial expressions, body language, voice tones, quality of speech… aspects of communication that we can easily take for granted. Of course, life usually gives us the experience we need to understand the unspoken, and we...
We grew up hearing that first impressions are lasting. The internet has redefined the meaning of “lasting” in that sentence, and social media added one more characteristic to it, “pervasive.” In the 21 st Century most of the people you will ever deal with will...
I’ve only been active on Facebook for a couple of years, if you could call having a few family members as friends “active”. In a sense, I’d been wading gradually into the social networking scene up until fairly recently. I’d always signed up for listservs and yahoo groups...
On Thursday, November 1, I received this email from a fellow interpreter: Dear friends and colleagues, I deeply regret to inform everyone that our dear, beloved friend, mentor, and colleague, Nancy Festinger has just passed away. There is no doubt that her loss will be felt by...
The Love of Language A number of thoughts and events came together recently to start me thinking about how we acquire language and how the ability to speak more than one language and interpret from one to the other is seen by those outside of the...
I have just finished reading Found in Translation, the new book which has just come out by Nataly and Jost, and is already lined up for a third printing! I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the T&I sector. Having worked in the industry...
The hotel housekeeper has a complaint, and I am there to interpret it. Sitting beside the housekeeper, I speak into a cheap handset speakerphone. On the other end, the hotel owner and district manager listen, encouraging the employee to air her concerns fully into the...
I wonder how long it takes the average interpreter to realize that their working environment has begun to reflect in who they are as a person? It’s pretty common to set up barriers to prevent a situation from striking at the core of our being; yet,...
A couple of weeks ago I was driving home from an interpreting assignment listening to NPR radio, as is my custom. The program was “Fresh Air,” and Terry Gross was interviewing an author named Michael Lewis on a piece of his in the magazine Vanity...
A few weeks back, I traveled to a distant town for a court interpreting assignment. It had been well worth the trip from a financial point of view, but I was really beat when I got home. As I was drifting off to sleep for...
