Happy Monday! To start the week off, here’s some positive and negative news from the language world:
- Positive: I was just listening to NPR‘s Talk of the Nation while eating lunch, and today’s segment featured an interview with NPR’s longtime (and now retiring) war correspondent, Anne Garrels. Garrels started her career reporting in the former Soviet Union and was one of the few Western journalists to remain in Iraq at the height of the U.S. invasion, which provided the material for her excellent memoir Naked in Baghdad. My favorite moment from the interview (which you can listen to tonight on NPR’s website): a caller asks Garrels something along these lines: “Ms. Garrels, how about the role of foreign languages in your career? Especially now that foreign languages are being de-emphasized in American schools?” and Anne Garrels immediately responds “Knowing Russian changed my life” (seriously!). Garrels then went on to describe how she never would have been offered the chance to report from the Soviet Union had she not spoken Russian. At that time (I believe she’s referring to the early 80s), the only interpreters available in Russia were also employed by the KGB, so “unauthorized” reporting was done by the very few Western journalists who spoke Russian. I’m excited to see the transcript of this interview when NPR publishes it; a beautiful moment for language awareness in the US. Update: the transcript of this interview is online here.
- But then: If you want a less rosy take on the state of our industry, read Terena Bell’s blog post Is our industry disconnected from clients?. In this very thorough post, Terena describes her experience attending the recent Harvard Social Enterprise Conference and specifically the conference’s global health track. Warning: it’s depressing. Terena describes sitting in the audience as a professor from the Harvard School of Public Health dismisses medical “translators” (a.k.a. interpreters) as fundamentally incompetent and the Pentagon’s International Health Specialist Program director doesn’t realize that medical interpreting is a profession. There is also a lot of excellent information in the comments on Terena’s post.
I thought the (perhaps less serious) highlight of the interview was Anne Garrels’ assertion that “a [foreign] language is best learned in the horizontal position.”
Oh my gosh, hilarious! I learned French in a vertical position and my husband only speaks English, but rumor in the language industry has it that her theory holds some water 🙂
Excellent food for thought, Corinne. I listen to NPR all day, but somehow missed this segment. Thanks for the reminder — I just ordered Anne’s book from my local library (who says the US government isn’t amazing at running some programs?), and I had a brief look at Terena’s post, too. Medical interpretation is a tricky field, and I hope that the current effort towards national certification (unfortunately, two concurrent efforts) help reposition the image of medical interpreting. It is incredibly challening, and our LEPs need to be served by making language services available to them. Unfortunately, there is a huge lack of training, no doubt exacerbated by doctors who use dual-role staff as “interpreters.” Everyone should at least take the Connecting Worlds or Bridging the Gap workshop — I took CW, and those 40 hours really gave me a great overview of the profession.
Thanks, Judy! Naked in Baghdad is excellent and Anne Garrels is amazing (not just because she speaks Russian!), I’m sure you will like it. I agree about medical interpreting; I don’t provide that service myself, but I agree that the lack of standardized certification is a problem. Then there’s the lack of understanding of what the job entails, the low pay, and let’s admit it, the fact that some interpreters create a bad name for the whole profession by violating ethical or professional standards. It will be interesting to see what happens with the certification effort!
Wow, Corrine! First, I’m impressed and flattered you included me in your post. Next, I’m sad it was depressing! I guess it is kind of sad, but on the upswing, I believe it CAN be fixed. I’m actually at another global health conference right now and, again, the only language services rep here. Trick is, these folks aren’t Harvard. They care! So, maybe that’s what I’ll blog on next: how to fix it–and then I could be the positive half of this blog!
Thanks for reading.