The conference opens with an address in a foreign language. The speaker launches headlong into a highly complex subject at breakneck speed. The talk is replete with terms whose spelling I can only guess, most of which encoded in the alphabet soup of acronyms. To make matters worse, he insists on cracking jokes as culturally-specific as they are untranslatable.
Settled into my booth at the back of the room, I diligently repeat every word, every idea in my language. I can’t stop moving my mouth. My head is adorned with a pair of earphones and a microphone that make me look like a pop star. Separated from the audience by a glass partition, I am often the target of an occasional fleeting glance from spectators.
The speech ends, and a lively Q&A session ensues, forcing me to translate the audience’s questions into a foreign language and the speaker’s answers back into Portuguese. Fifteen minutes later, the linguistic shootout is suspended for a merciful coffee break.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I set down my headphones. I slip out of the booth, and an enormous sense of freedom washes over me. Still somewhat stunned and without a clear recollection of the last 40 minutes, I weave my way through the crowds that have inundated the lobby. At the buffet table, a woman approaches me. She has a headset in her hands, and the memory of my voice is probably still vivid in her ears. I anticipate a complaint and scan her face for any sign of dissatisfaction. But to my surprise, she congratulates me on the quality of my interpretation and then follows up with a question that has been nagging her since the beginning of the conference: “How do you do that?!”
The Storytelling Problem
In his thought-provoking book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what he calls the storytelling problem. He says human beings “are a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we really don’t have an explanation for.” We are uncomfortable at not having rational explanations for what we do. We’re left with a disturbing sense of uselessness, the impression that things happen by chance, that our performance is the result of sheer luck. Unable to deduce logical conclusions from evidence, we feel frustrated. And to escape that frustration, we tell a story. We devise our hypothesis and arbitrarily accept it as fact, soon clinging to that ’fact’ as a way of giving meaning to what we do. We’re not trying to conceal anything, nor are we pathological liars. It’s part of being human.
In the absence of an explanation that is even marginally believable, we turn to superstition, to a belief in some higher power or the so-called sixth sense. Gladwell cites the case of a fireman, whose intuition has saved him from potentially fatal accidents on numerous occasions. He always leaves a burning building seconds before tragedy strikes. Amazed, he attributes his miraculous escapes to some extra-sensory perception. That is the story he tells himself.
In interpretation, much remains to be explained. We don’t know for sure which neurological phenomena make it possible for the brain to coordinate so many processes at once. It’s as if the brain splits but at the same time is more connected than ever. And if it does split, it certainly doesn’t just split in two, but rather into multiple parallel brains that work on thousands of concurrent tasks of which we are hardly conscious.
Gladwell sheds new light on this phenomenon, exposing an adaptive unconscious that reasons at high speed using minimum information. That adaptive unconscious—not to be confused with the repressed unconscious described by Sigmund Freud—is what allows us to make such snap decisions. It operates according to mechanisms that are invisible to that part of our brain that wants an explanation for everything. But it works behind a locked door. It’s fickle and reserved. It doesn’t take kindly to invasions of its privacy, nor does it offer up its secrets freely. It works best when left alone. It can’t be drowned out by rational analysis, and it doesn’t like being asked ’why?’
Interpreters are in a constant race against time. They live under pressure. They can’t always afford the luxury of collecting massive amounts of information. They must edit, limit the number of options available and forgo lengthy word-choice processes. They have to be economical and objective. They have to be frugal. They have to do more with less. Our adaptive unconscious allows us to do just that.
Interpreting is making decisions, and good decision-making depends not on the volume of available information, but rather on our ability to extract the most meaning from the thinnest slices of reality. That is particularly important when faced with limitations in time, processing capacity, and content. It’s something we do intuitively, from experience, without ’thinking.’ It’s what determines our good or bad feelings about a certain person or situation. That inexplicable attraction or deep-seated aversion may appear entirely random. But look closely, and you’ll find that a core of invisible information conditions our first impressions. It may be a facial microexpression, or an unapparent similarity with some power figure, or a soothing voice leading us to recall select memories, or words evoking an emotional state to which we secretly aspire. Be that as it may, this information is transparent, something we perceive without seeing clearly, something unconscious.
Just like that fireman, you and I are gifted with alternative and unconscious rapid cognition mechanisms. Our ability to do often surpasses our capacity to explain why. Homo faber is capable of working independently. And homo sapiens is not omniscient, after all. The two walk side by side, but not always hand in hand. We need to give ourselves more credit and respect that fact. We need to stop telling stories.
Locking the Brain Out
Matters that involve what we would call insight follow a different set of rules. In these cases, thinking—that is, conscious thinking in a traditional sense—usually bogs us down. Our intuitive mind extends beyond our brain, and at times even does without it. A classical guitarist is capable of executing from memory complex pieces learned through systematic practice. But, after a long period of inactivity, he will have a difficult time remembering a solo in its entirety. The first chords will come with ease, but at any moment his fingers may get lost, and the rest of the piece won’t be there. When that happens, reproducing the melody in one’s head or analytically mapping the fretboard does little to bring back the lost notes. The solution musicians have discovered is to repeat the section they can remember over and over while deliberately trying to ignore the music. When they stop consciously trying to remember, as they relax and focus their attention elsewhere, without thinking or wondering why, the music returns. The hand comes alive, and it’s the fingers that do the remembering. But for that to happen, the rational mind must be turned off. The door has to be shut. The brain must be locked out.
Even so, a word of caution is in order. Our unconscious mind may be autonomous and have a life of its own, but it doesn’t always get it right. It lacks the cognitive environment previously created by our conscious attention. It relies on previously directed effort, systematic training, specific preparation, and accumulated experience. Left to its own devices, and without the counterpoint of reason and traditional knowledge, our unconscious tends toward more immediate stereotypes. It opens the door to our preconceptions, which quietly begin to dictate our choices and preferences based on false premises. It leads us to decisions that we don’t understand. Our intuition can also fail us. Effective decision-making requires analytical as well as emotional balance.
In the interpretation booth, we often receive information from sources we are unable to identify. There are things we remember through conscious memorization and analogy. Other pieces of information come from a different kind of memory, where the mere sound of a word in a foreign language seems to unleash inferences that automatically lead to its equivalent in the other language. Sometimes a shake of your booth mate’s head or an almost imperceptible mouth or eye expression is all it takes to save you and bring just the right phrase to the fore. A casual reading of the program of a professional conference, minutes before it begins, or a stroll through the exhibit hall, can be the perfect complement to hours of preparation the night before. Our capacity to capture information greatly surpasses our ability to explain why or how. In a sense, by need as well as intention, we learn partly by osmosis, extracting as much as we can from broken conversations and texts, in a hodgepodge of random elements that surprisingly come together a few hours later, during the conference.
Psychology is quite familiar with that effect of influencing or predisposing our mind to a certain type of knowledge or experience and can even induce it. It’s known as priming. Like interpreting, it seems like magic. It can’t work. It shouldn’t work. And yet it does! We just don’t know exactly how. So, again, a word of advice seems appropriate here: before the session begins, regardless of how much preparation you have already done, flip through the program. Walk through the exhibition hall, if there is one. Stop at the different stands. Talk to people. Ask questions, at the risk of sounding foolish. You don’t really care about the answers. You just need the many technical terms recited back to you, terms that will probably come up in a presentation 15 minutes later. And on your way back to the booth after a coffee break, wander around to see what is on display. Do so to relax, just for the fun of it, not as a conscious preparation exercise. The results may surprise you.
The Unconscious You
As it turns out, our intuitive mind extends beyond our brain and at times even does without it. Our unconscious perceives and processes many signals that our rational mind cannot. It reaches under the surface and breaks down a complex picture into minimum units of meaning, the thinnest slices of the whole, getting as close as possible to the basics, to the DNA, if you will, of a situation. And it brings us information coded in almost instinctive impulses to act.
In the interpretation booth, this process can take various forms: an unusual sense of comfort with a speech or a speaker, an almost telepathic rapport with your colleague in the booth, that wonderful feeling of being able to read the mind of another person, at times even guessing what she has to say. This is when we are able to shake off the literalness of a speech and reconstruct the ideas with our own vocabulary, expressing them as we normally would. This is when we are really interpreting, spontaneously and accurately, thanks to our surprisingly complete—and again inexplicable—understanding of a subject previously inaccessible to the unwashed.
We have this ability to read body language, to derive robust inferences from abstract concepts, to intuitively discern the intention behind a speech, to finish a thought based more on the feeling it inspires than on the words used to express it. We just have to think without thinking. All it takes is some balancing between the rational mind and that mysterious part of us that can make the impossible seem surprisingly trivial, that intuitive part of us that gets it right even when we may feel we are guessing. We know how to do it. We just don’t know why.
According to Joshua Aronson, one of the researchers quoted in Blink, “people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant.” I couldn’t agree more. Ultimately, how is it that we interpreters are able to do what we do? Over the years I have gathered many clues, but perhaps all I have done amounts to little more than storytelling.
In an effort to answer the question posed by that kind woman during the coffee break we shared so long ago, I have tried a number of keys to unlock the door. Despite my best efforts, it’s still closed. All that is left is for me to accept Aronson’s counsel and admit that the most honest answer I have to her question still is simply “I don’t know.”
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Do you agree with the arguments in this text?
Will interpreting ever be fully understood or explained?
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A variation of this article appeared in the ATA Chronicle in April of 2010, translated from Portuguese by my good friend and fellow interpreter Barry Slaughter Olsen.