When I was an interpreting student, I was taught by a gifted teacher. She was a double A — English and French —equally at home in both languages. I was very familiar with the way she spoke in each, having heard her use both languages at length to explain things in the classroom. Or so I thought.
One day after class, I was watching CPAC with a classmate, and we heard an interpreter begin her turn during Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. Impressed with the work of the interpreter, I turned to my classmate and asked, “Who do you think that is?” He looked at me as though I had sprouted horns. “That’s our teacher,” he said. I was taken aback.
No matter how hard I tried, I just could not associate the voice of the interpreter I was hearing with the woman who taught me three hours a week for 24 weeks. The voice of the working interpreter was — to my mind, at least — completely different from that of my teacher. Why, even the accents were different!
My teacher was an extreme example of a trend that is nevertheless widespread among conference interpreters. Most of us have an interpreting persona. There is a role that we play, a character that we become, when we switch into working mode. It’s a more polished, more professional version of ourselves. And it’s something that I encourage all my students to develop.
But how will you know if you have a fully formed interpreting persona? Here are a few ideas.
Confidence
Being a good interpreter is sometimes about learning to bluff. Often, we feel a sense of panic when we work. We’re convinced we haven’t understood the speaker. We’re not sure we know the right way to say something in the target language. But we can’t let any of that show in our voices. We have to sound like we have everything under control. Like we understand everything effortlessly, and like it’s child’s play to convey the idea in another language. We have to sound confident.
Easier said than done. How do you sound cool as a cucumber when you’re actually feeling the heat? One way is by paying attention to the pitch of your voice. Below is a link to a recording of me playing with the pitch of my voice. When I interpret, I find I have a tendency to let the pitch of my voice climb — this is especially true when I work into my B language. As a result, I sound stressed and strained, and it would be unpleasant for a client to listen to me. I try as much as possible to let my vocal apparatus relax, so that my pitch falls naturally into the middle portion of my range. Every once in a while— to stress a word or to end a sentence — I will dip into the lowest part of my register. I don’t do this often, as it would stress my voice as much as using the higher portions of my register.
One thing you might was to try is shadowing this short recording. Try to follow the rise and fall of my voice, and pay careful attention to what each of the sensations, high, medium and low, feels like for you. Practice reading a text out loud in each part of your vocal register, until you learn to recognize each part of your register merely by the way it feels. When you are actually interpreting, wait for a moment when you have a handle on things. Then, focus for a second on dropping your voice into the middle part of your range. The more often you are able to do this, the more confident you will sound. There are other techniques for sounding confident when we don’t feel that way, but this is a good one to start with.
Neutrality
This second point is a sensitive one. No one likes to be told that the accent they speak with is in some way not good enough. But the reality is we are going to be listened to by a wide range of clients, people from different places and walks of life. If our way of speaking isn’t neutral, we won’t be understood. In the same way that the pitch of your voice should fall into the middle of your range, so too should your accent be situated somewhere in the middle of what’s possible for your language variety.
I know that there is invariably a political dimension to this. Throughout history, people who spoke one way beat upon people who spoke another. The bullies then declared their manner of speaking to be “superior” and that of the bullied to be “inferior”. Talking about modifying accents sometimes rubs salt into long-standing wounds. But I’m not asking you to be something that you are not. When I speak English in the booth, no one is going to mistake me for an Irishman, or an Australian, or a South African. When I speak French, no one is going to think I am Belgian, or Senegalese, or Haitian. In both cases, I am instantly recognizable as Canadian. That said, I do try to identify the sounds in both my English and French that are particularly difficult for non-Canadians to decode, and I do my best to tone them down.
In the recording below, I demonstrate two sounds in English and two sounds in French that I try to dial back a bit. In English, the first sound is the nasalized “a” that is typical of the Niagara region where I grew up. The second sound is “ou” of Canadian raising (Canadian raising is the reason that Canadians pronounce the words “house” and “houses” with different vowels). In French, the first sound is the diphthong (triphthong?) “a” typical of stressed long vowels in informal Québec speech. The second is dental assimilation before a high-fronted vowel such as “i” or “u”(this is the reason Quebeckers pronounce the word “tu” as [tsy] rather than [ty]). In each case, you can hear me try to minimize these hallmark sounds. You can also decide for yourself whether I succeed!
The point here for you is to do similar work with your working languages. Are there any sounds that might mark your speech as being regional? As being not quite broadcast-ready? Record yourself interpreting or even just reading a text aloud. Then listen carefully for anything that sounds “marked” to your ear, or ask someone else to help you with this. These will be the target sounds you need to work on.
What I’ve written here is obviously not an exhaustive list. There are other techniques you can use to create your interpreting persona. In a future blog post, perhaps I will revisit this topic and make some additional suggestions. But in the meantime, do some thinking and decide who it is that you want to be as an interpreter.