A salute to my Siberian interpreters

Read this post in Russian, translated by Google. Читать этот пост на русском языке, перевод Google.

Teaching through an interpreter is something like telling a story on Twitter. You have to learn to make each point briefly.

I like to think I develop some rhythm and momentum in my speaking style when I’m leading a workshop in English.

In the same way, I enjoyed the rhythm and momentum of long-form writing in my days as a newspaper reporter. Most of the stories I remember fondly from my reporting were long narratives, in-depth investigative stories and detailed explanatory pieces. But I have enjoyed and learned from the Twitter challenge and excitement of writing something meaningful and clear in just 140 characters.

Speaking through an interpreter, Sergey Krotov, to Siberian journalists and media executives in Barnaul last week, I began to feel as though I was speaking in tweets. If I kept each statement brief, Sergey could relay it more accurately to the workshop participants. And just like Twitter, I could keep on speaking, one short burst after another, so I covered what I needed to, developing a new rhythm and momentum.

At previous presentations to Latin American audiences in Mexico City and Ecuador, I spoke through simultaneous interpreters. I’m amazed at the concentration that requires, listening in one language while you’re speaking in another. I consciously slowed down a bit to make that job easier, but I was able to manage the pace and rhythm.

When I met with a group from the Press Development Institute-Siberia at the University of Kentucky in September, we used consecutive translation. But the group was small, so our conversation was informal and the interpreter seemed just a pivotal person in a casual conversation among friends.

In planning the workshops, I knew I had to cut down my presentation to allow time for translation. I was less sure how to handle audience interaction. I usually avoid question-and-answer sessions at the end of a presentation. I encourage people to ask questions as we go along. And I ask them some questions or involve them through participatory exercises, which makes them feel more comfortable speaking up spontaneously. I think a conversation is usually a better learning format than a lecture.

That sort of give-and-take didn’t work quite as well in Siberia. However well Sergey was translating, the pauses disrupted the easy conversation flow that invites spontaneous questions. So I worked in specific Q&A periods in each workshop and Sergey handled them adeptly.

I know he was interpreting accurately because the questions that came back to me, again through his translation, related correctly to the presentations I had made.

I was the only English-speaking person teaching in last week’s workshops, so I listened to simultaneous interpretation during the other sessions, as Sergey, his fiancee Katya Pashnina and Ekaterina (Kate) Karavaeva of PDI-S took turns softly speaking and listening at the same time.

I learned German and Spanish decades ago in high school and college, and found on trips to Germany, Venezuela, Mexico and Ecuador that I had forgotten most of what I had learned. I relied on natives who spoke English and on interpreters in each of those trips. What little Spanish or German I remembered usually came back to me a couple minutes after I was groping for a word or trying to recognize what someone was saying.

I was kind of pleased with myself for learning how to train effectively through an interpreter. But when I thought about what the interpreters were doing, I was quickly humbled. That’s a skill I won’t ever learn.

Mimi is blogging about our trip to Russia as well and wrote earlier about our interpreters. We flew from Barnaul to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg today. We will tour St. Petersburg tomorrow. I plan to blog about our tours, as well as another post or two on the programs from Barnaul, probably in the next day or two. You can see more photos from our travels on my Flickr page.

Kate, Katya and Sergey