Job Discussion Forums

[mejms]

Calerdon�s translator butchered the president�s comments during the opening ceremony to his visit to the White House. At least this guy isn�t Calderon�s regular translator, but dang....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/19/AR2010051903350.html

[Phil_K]

The strange thing is that when Calder�n speaks English himself, as he did in the Congress, it ain't too hot! Strange, because he studied a Masters at Harvard!

[Guy Courchesne]

Shoot, Calderon's English is better than a great number of native English speakers. He's got an accent of course, but his speech at Congress was perfectly fine.

[mejms]

That reminds me of this funny little tidbit:

Of the 89 people sitting on the Republican members� side of the aisle, pretending to listen attentively to President Calder�n�s speech to the United States House of Representatives, only 29 were actually House Members. The other 60 were mostly teen-aged pages, along with a few staffers rounded up to make it look as if the party of business is actually interested in the United States� relations with its third largest trading partner and foreign oil supplier, and second largest export market.

On the other hand, it was kind of a dull speech.

Here's the link to the same article:

http://mexfiles.net/

And this is another page that I just came across the other day, and I think it's great. On the right hand side, there are more links that have all sorts of short little humorous but true articles in English about Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Great for conversational students.

http://burrohall.blogspot.com/

Dang, now that I post here, I spend too much time doing so. I guess I'm finally talking to other teachers rather than just off on my own teaching. I'm hooked.

[notamiss]

Throughout the day, I've seen the Washington Post article cited on every language forum that I follow (being these ESL forums and a number of translation forums). There's been considerable condemnation of the interpreter, or of those who gave him the assignment.

The writer of the article characterizes the interpreter's work as "halting and grammatically incoherent." I took a look at the videos of Calderon's speech and I don't agree with the reporter's assessment. Either she isn't used to listening to speeches presented by an on-the-fly interpreter (i.e. one who isn't working from a script, but translating in real time as he listens to the speech) or she has a political agenda, or both.

The paragraph cited in the article doesn't seem to me to be an example of bad translation. The interpreter's version expresses the meaning of the other version, and the differences and awkward expressions can be accounted for by the fact that the interpreter is working in real time and doesn't have the opportunity enjoyed by the text translator to see ahead to the ends of sentences and select and employ target language idioms and ways of expression. This is normal for simultaneous interpretation.

On Canadian television, for instance�Guy will be familiar with this�when an English-language news report runs footage of a politician speaking in French, the English voice-over interpretation is often more halting and accented than Calder�n's interpreter. We are used to it. The Post reporter apparently isn't.