Evolving Paradigms in Interpreter Education:

Foreword: Interpreting and Inquiry

xiii FOREWORD: INTERPRETING AND INQUIRY Here is a book of scholarship on interpreting and the education of interpreters . It is a collection of thoughtful perspectives on different aspects of our craft. These pages offer ample evidence that inquire and interpret are thick as thieves: It is difficult to pursue either without needing the other. They are comrades in arms in the ancient struggle to see things clearly and unequivocally. The twin urges to know precisely and to communicate precisely drive the work of interpretation just as they drive the work of scholarship. In the happy dreamland of interpreters, all things are visible and audible , and who is saying what to whom, why, and where are always known. In this place, apprehensions blossom into comprehensions. Confidence finds purpose and takes hold. Grounded in this basic information, interpreters can direct their attention to how best to facilitate communication. There is, to be sure, a less hospitable dreamland, a place interpreters hardly dare speak of. In this grim quarter, apprehension blossoms into anxiety as the unknown and unknowable run riot. Here the seeds of who, what, and why can find no purchase and neither inquiry nor interpreting stands much of a chance. The festival of person, place, and purpose is the landscape of interpreting , a place so changeable that one moment our predictions prove accurate and we speak with authority and the next moment the simple construct “the baby with the bathwater” remains suspended, untouched by our blinkered probing, a piñata just out of range. Inquiry into who we are, what we do, and how we ought to behave has long been a source of fascination. Estela Herrera (2002) mines this rich vein in her essay “What Can Interpreters Learn from Aristotle and xiv Foreword Stanislavsky?” Herrera offers applications of Aristotle’s notions on talent and techne and Stanislavsky’s techniques for being present “in the moment.” Herrera deserves praise for expanding the workbench of interpreters to include these useful perspectives. Inquiry into identity has serious ramifications for interpreters. Knowing about myself, about who I am and why I am present, is every bit as important as knowing those things about the people for whom I interpret. Sometimes I am present as the interpreter. Sometimes I am the interpreter/aide and sometimes the employee. The rules in each of those settings are quite different . It well behooves our practice to consider formally who we are and why we are where we are. In the funhouse mirror of interpreting, every “who are you?” reflects back “who am I?” and “what do you want?” glimmers with “what do I want?” Just as perceptions of Self and Other morph and morph again, so do the roulette wheels of Role, Motivation, and Setting spin out the parameters of interpreting, combining and recombining kaleidoscopically, sometimes rewarding our wagers and sometimes not. The role confusion of “who am I?” is bred into interpreters. In an earlier telling of our tale, we were half-bloods or cross-marrieds, commanded into service on incursions into hostile territory. Another time before that, we were tonsured monks translating in number and obscurity for an audience of elites. In this part of our heritage, we knew ourselves simply as employees. Castaño (2005) quotes Jane’s (1930) translation of the journal of Christopher Columbus, just as Columbus has an inspiration upon having been in first contact with the Arawak people: It had appeared to [me] that it would be well to take some persons, in order to carry them to the sovereigns, that they might learn our language, in order to discover what there is in the land and that, on their return, they might be tongues for the Christians and adopt our customs and the things of our faith. Castaño (2005, 49) continues, Indian interpreters filled a role of servants and were exposed to an immersion method to learn Spanish. After his second journey, Columbus wrote in a letter addressed to the Catholic kings in 1495: “there are now sent with these ships some of the cannibals, men and women and boys and girls. These their highnesses can order to be Foreword xv placed in charge of persons so that they may be able better to learn the language, employing them in forms of service.” Count Columbus, then, was an early proponent of service learning in the education of interpreters. Indeed, interpreters and translators among our forebears have been...