Day: February 17, 2025

Don’t interpret, just translate.

I was interpreting one day in a deposition in the US Embassy and needed to make a comment on the record about why I had interpreted a certain term in English the way I did. Everyone appeared to understand and agree with the comment, but one of the attorneys piped up to say “Please don’t interpret, just translate.”

Both the interpreters in the room had to hold back from laughing. The attorney was demonstrating one of the reasons people outside the interpreting/translation tent often confuse the terms and call an interpreter a translator. I have often corrected people when they get these terms wrong, but I think we translators and interpreters (and the rare individuals do both translation and interpreting between JA and EN) might consider admitting defeat in the interpreter/translator battle.

It’s just a translator.

Some years ago I was interpreting in depositions at the US Consulate in Osaka. It happened that the opposing side’s interpreter, who would be interpreting for the attorney examining the deponent, was engaged rather suddenly and was not yet on the list of persons to be allowed into the Consulate. He was being made to wait on the first floor while they tried to work through the administrative problems to let him in.

Since the deposition couldn’t proceed without a lead interpreter (I was the check interpreter), we took a break. In the waiting area outside the deposition room, the deposition-taking attorney was at a window discussing the problem.

“Is it an attorney downstairs waiting to enter?” a Consulate official asked him.

“No, it’s just a translator (sic)” was the reply, referring to the interpreter.

The mistake of characterizing an interpreter as a translator aside, this makes me wonder how the attorney intended to examine the Japanese deponent if the person who is “just a translator” was stuck downstairs, waiting among huddled masses of visa applicants, yearning to breath free or whatever they intended to do in the US.

The interpreter in question is well-known and had spent many more years perfecting his professional skills than did the youngish above-noted attorney.