Tag: interpreting

Interpreting, mainly between Japanese and English.

Meeting Interpreting 101 Taught by a Clueless Client

One day I received an inquiry about interpreting in a meeting to be held between several foreigners and an undisclosed number of Japanese participants, regarding an undisclosed topic, and the failure to disclose turned out to be the deal-breaker.

When I asked the inquiring foreigner what the topic of the meeting was, he replied that I don’t need to know that. I tried to explain the reason the interpreter should know what the subject matter is beforehand, not the least of which is determining whether even to accept the assignment, but it fell on deaf ears—those ears apparently were positioned at either side of a brain that needed to work a bit harder on the problem of securing interpreting services.

In what appeared to be frustration at my having the temerity to ask what the meeting was going to be about, the clueless foreigner launched into Meeting Interpreting 101, describing to me what interpreting was.

He kindly explained to me that “We’ll speak in English, and you will say what we said in Japanese, and then the other side speaks Japanese, after which you say what they said in English.”

I was flabbergasted—people who know me will understand that my flabber is quite gasting-resistant—and told him that he needed to go elsewhere. Story over, or so I thought.

Just several days later, a female called to ask for an interpreter. It turned out to be the same clueless people. My guess is that they were having the same sort of responses from other interpreters they spoke to. Some people are ineducable.

Cringeworthy Court Interpreting

Years ago, I used to visit the Tokyo District Court to watch the work of other interpreters. I was there in the gallery watching a criminal case one day, in which the accused was a US marine who was charged with assaulting a customer at a bar—if I remember correctly, it was Gas Panic, often frequented by foreigners.

The interpreter stumbled numerous times, and one time she could not remember the expression for shin in English, which is where the victim was said to have been kicked by the accused. She tried to finesse it by saying the “front of the bottom part of the leg.”

I must have cringed visibly from the gallery, because when the session had finished, the judge, having gotten into the elevator with me, after verifying his suspicion that I was an interpreter, invited me into his office, where he asked if I was interested in being a court interpreter.

What ensued was an education about how court interpreters are paid in Japan. I believe a figure of something like 50,000 yen for a full day was mentioned. The problem, however, is that full days almost never occur, and you only get paid for the actual hours you’re in the courtroom interpreting, which could be an hour or two. There’s no minimum charge or compensation for travel and no compensation for preparation. That would bring the effective compensation down to a small fraction of what deposition interpreters normally bill, and an even smaller fraction of the amount that, ironically and atypically, I was paid by the special investigators (essentially the same organization as the courts) for interpreting in the slammer up in Kosuge back in 2018-19. I gave a non-committal response, but there was no chance of me becoming a court interpreter.

After this encounter, the government mentioned a plan to establish court interpreter qualifications, but I don’t know what happened to that plan.

Thoughts on Work in Recent Years

Thinking back on my last few years of translation and interpreting work, I recall that I turned 73 during my largest-ever single interpreting assignment, and I turned 78 during my largest-ever single translation job. These assignments happened seven and two years ago, respectively.

The former was 35 consecutive calendar days of interpreting in a detention facility for a Japanese government agency in a high-profile case involving foreign executives of a company here, and the latter was 1200-plus pages of translation for a US military legal group in a distinctly low-profile case involving a US military person. Crime pays.

I’m not actively chasing new clients these days, but when one chases me, I give some thought to allowing them to catch me.