Think You Have An Edge? Think Again
In 1988, I was living in Constance, West Germany, as a graduate student. The Seoul Olympics were upon us. I would compromise on anything, as long as I didn’t miss the men’s 100-meter dash final, the long-awaited confrontation between the legendary Carl Lewis and the Jamaican turned Canadian Ben Johnson.
The TV set in my dorm room had been found on the street, two days prior, in a popular German exchange tradition called Spermüll. It was a battered, black and white 15-inch, and much to my surprise it worked fine.
Just for half an hour, though. At the end of 30 minutes the circuitry heated up and the image got fuzzy. A few seconds more and it all spiraled into an indistinct vortex, with the sound soon going, too. At that point, my TV had to be turned off and left to cool for another half an hour.
In time I devised an ingenious way to keep abreast of the news and follow at least the Formula 1 races. I would switch the TV on and off at timed 30-minute intervals. With the help of precisely-timed German TV airings, I did just fine.
But in the 100-meter Olympic final, it all went south, and there was no telling when the race would start. I prayed that my 30-minute allowance would hold long enough. It didn’t. The athletes were barely off their starting blocks when the race tracks all merged in an indecipherable, soundless contrail. I spent the rest of the night, several time zones away, desperately turning the clunky channel knob for 30 minutes at a time, to no avail.
Back in the day, a sprinter’s reaction time – i.e., how fast the racer reacts to the firing of the gun – was believed to be a genetic trait. Ben Johnson was naturally gifted in that regard and spring-loaded ahead of all others. But I could bet all my chips that Carl Lewis would eventually recover the lost terrain and overtake the Canadian, who looked too bulky to be fast.
In high-performance sports, success is a somewhat predictable business. A simple test of an athlete’s muscle fibers will indicate the disciplines at which he or she will excel. Champions are cherry-picked early on, in a process that involves popularization and careful screening.
Uncooking the soup
When I later transitioned from fitness to interpreting, I thought it only natural that the same logic would apply. I tended to believe that the great interpreters were born and privileged by a fully multilingual upbringing, with two or more languages occurring naturally and effortlessly. In my mind, a top-notch interpreter would necessarily have been born in a fully bilingual environment. Success required absolute mastery of all one’s working languages without a trace of an accent. The ability to interpret simultaneously was, just like the sprinter’s reaction time, a genetically encoded, unalterable attribute. Or so I thought.
My subsequent career as a trainer of interpreters would soon disprove the thesis. As it soon became evident, the notion that interpreting results from innate talent is just the first of a series of misconceptions about the trade. In a training environment, candidates with perfect linguistic credentials have the hardest time getting past the initial exercises. While they rely on a vocabulary that is far more complete than that of their peers, they tend to be too demanding on themselves and come to expect a level of performance that is simply unattainable when you’re just starting out. Their frustration mounts when the next classmate in the booth does surprisingly well, despite her limitations.
Humans are competitive by nature, but our self-knowledge is always limited. The better our skills, and the awareness of such skills, the higher our self-imposed demands. Upon realizing one’s comparative edge – say, one’s fully bilingual abilities – it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility. With that responsibility comes fear and performance suffers.
But there is more to it. An interesting process goes on inside the fully bilingual mind. In time, different languages and cultural experiences blend into one another in a seamless flow. The many semantic constructs, and the different rational and emotional responses elicited by each, eventually fuse into one same melting pot of common experiences, one single database. In a fully bilingual mind, what we would call ‘translation’ occurs naturally, in an unconscious exercise that will later make it all seem artificial when one has to interpret and look for equivalences.
Now, for those of us who learned a foreign language through conscious effort, there will always be the perception of two distinct worlds. While they touch one another they never fully intersect. Communication then becomes an accumulation of linguistic and metalinguistic mechanisms, with much attention given to gestures and subtle intonation changes. This creates the need for alternative communication tactics, and it imposes greater reliance on ancillary inputs such as body language. With the right personality, and hard work, such a process, although equally unconscious may work to one’s advantage in the interpretation booth.
On the surface, this analysis may seem obvious or common sense, but it lends itself to rather intriguing inferences. Our way of thinking, our emotional reactions, our language, our inflexibility, our ability to improvise, our informality and casualness are, in no small part, defined by the cultures in which we grew up. And the way in which we acquire our languages will largely determine the functioning of our mind, our predispositions, our prejudices, our outlook on the world, our personality, even. The frontier between language and cognition is still fuzzy, with little consensus so far as to what comes first – speech or thought. The shape of our hands and our dexterity differentiated us from other primates, gradually allowing us tactile and manipulative experiences that would eventually create new synaptic pathways and ultimately enhance our cognitive potential. Analogously, our speech and the virtues or limitations of our languages configure and discipline our way of thinking and how we look upon the world.
For most of us, white is a distinct color, or the plain absence thereof, the opposite of black. For an Inuit, white is a continuum of multiple shades, each carrying a specific label and triggering a linguistic and emotional reaction of its own. What for us is just a bland semantic attribute, a flat adjective, to an Inuit requires the mastery of a far vaster vocabulary, with sensorial and logical implications that are literally visible.
Language acquisition is an individualized process with a collective counterpoint where our choices are validated or refuted by our environment and labeled success or failure depending on how high they score vis-à-vis a shared repository of cultural references. These references, in turn, transcend the mere linguistic realm, though. Caucasians usually think of a zebra as a white animal with black stripes, but a native African may see it as a white-striped black horse. A person born and raised in the United States will readily understand the practicality of killing two birds with one stone. But a Brazilian like me will likely picture two rabbits being struck dead by a single blow of a club.
These choices tend to occur naturally, without much conscious elaboration. For interpreters or translators, irrespective of our bilingualism, several of these conceptual and linguistic cross-references need to be deconstructed. A different process is set in motion, forcing us to trace back our steps and undo associations made long ago. We feel the need to see the world through two distinct sets of lenses which, in the case of bilinguals, had merged long ago. In a certain way, we need to unlearn.
The situation can’t help but bring to mind Winston Smith, the main character in 1984, overwhelmed by the cruelty of a world where truth and lie were relative concepts and where “stupidity was as necessary as intelligence and as difficult to attain.” Paradoxically, in interpretation, as in the surreal world of Orwell, ignorance is strength, too.
It is great to rely on some competitive advantage – a superior reaction time if you’re a sprinter, or a prodigious memory if you’re an interpreter. But to keep ahead of the curve and sustain your lead without any fear of the post-race blood screening, one needs more than just a head start.
Beyond the edge
The morning after my sleepless night at that university dorm in Konstanz, the Südkourier pictured the Canadian crossing the finish line ahead of all others, his arm provocatively raised in victory while still in motion. New world record: 9:79s.
As the saying goes, success comes before work only in dictionaries (for most languages, at least). Our competitive edge, whatever it is, will carry us only halfway. The home stretch to the imaginary finish line requires much sweat and dedication.
To everyone’s dismay, Johnson tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs following the race. Despite his competitive advantage, his success was short-lived. He had to surrender his medal to his rival and was banned from sports for good. The flying Canadian, the Big Ben as they used to call him, the second-best sprinter in the world was turned off and left to cool. Just like my cheap TV set.
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