I’ve been pretty much only focused on Chinese to English translating for the past few years, with a couple of exceptions while working in Beijing with phone conference interpreting or helping out a visitor to Beijing who wanted to interview someone (that ended up in the awkward situation of both my client having an intrepreter and the interviewee bringing their own interpreter…) I guess the reason I was hesitant to do interpreting was out of lack of experience and lack of confidence. Last fall I had the chance to attend a workshop on sight interpreting, though, and I really liked it, but didn’t really know where to go from there. The thing I liked about interpreting was that unlike translating, I got to actually use Chinese and the language came alive for me again. When translating from Chinese into English the Chinese is basically dead–you can’t change it, and all you can really do with it is look up the words you don’t know. You can play around with the English all you want. 

Nothing really came of it, though, until I had a slow period awhile back, and was sending out resumes, when a phone interpreting agency said they wanted me to work for them. I had been hesitant about doing phone interpreting because I didn’t have the confidence that I could do it, and knew that I lacked the knowledge in the areas they most need, which is medical and legal. But I figured, what the heck, I can always choose not to do it if I don’t like it, right? So I boned up on my medical terminology and did their test call to see if I qualified, which I did, but just barely. My legal terminology was still pretty bad, and I tend to come up with awkward phrases in Chinese. But the thing with interpreting is that you don’t need to necessarily know a bunch of technical terms, but rather that you can get the message across. 

So far I’ve really liked doing the phone interpreting, because it gets me learning new Chinese vocab and improving my Chinese, which I wasn’t really doing when translating. It’s also interesting because you have absolutely no idea what the call will be about when you pick it up, and you get the feeling that you are actually helping people. A lot of people are either sick or trying to deal with some bank or insurance company or are talking to the police, and even though they aren’t the ones paying for the service, they are the ones who most need the help. The downside is that I hardly ever understand absolutely everything that is being said, because there is either lots of background noise, the signal is bad, or the person is talking too fast or in a difficult accent, and that can be frustrating. 

I also signed up to take my state’s court interpreter exam, just to see where that might take me, if anywhere. It’s an incredibly slow process. First there’s an English written exam that tests your knowledge of English and legal terms that’s given once a year I think. Then there’s the oral exam that’s also once a year that tests your interpreting skills (sight, consecutive, and simultaneous). I passed the written exam fine, but it was the oral exam I was worried about. I took that one a few days ago, and was glad I did it, althouh I won’t know the results until January or something like that. I realized, though, that I had made a mistake that English teachers in China always tell their students to avoid–don’t just memorize the dictionary, you have to practice! I was so worried about learning all the legal terms that I didn’t have time to practice sight and simultaneous interpreting. I think with interpreting it is not necessarily the number of words you know, but rather how much practice you’ve had at getting the meaning across. 

I’m definitely glad I started doing interpreting as it provides a nice change of pace, although it still only takes up less than 1/4 of my time now I would say.

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