Here's a fact...

By Wreybies · Mar 3, 2014 · 599 · 3
  1. When you work as an interpreter, you live in a flipped world of grammatical person. Whatever your interlocutors say is repeated by you, in the target language, in the first person, as though you were the actual person who originated the statement. This is done for the sake of maintaining accuracy of what was said. What they say, you say. You never say things like, "What he said was...." No. Bad interpreter. So that means the first person is nixed as an option whenever you, the interpreter, need to step out from your cloak of invisibility for a moment (it happens, there are reasons) and need to say something as you yourself. In those cases, you must refer to yourself in a strangely servile third person mode. "The Interpreter understood the statement to be the following..." That's you, making a statement about what you understood.

    Flipped.
    obsidian_cicatrix likes this.

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  1. jazzabel
    I remember doing my first court interpreter gig, it was a highly emotionally charged situation, and I remember feeling so weird speaking in first person for everybody, there were so many of them, lawyers, a judge, jury, clients... I felt like i was suffering from multiple personality disorder.
    jazzabel, Mar 3, 2014
  2. Alesia
    I wouldn't be able to do a job like that. I can barely convey my own thoughts, much less someone else's.
    Alesia, Mar 4, 2014
      Wreybies likes this.
  3. Wreybies
    It's a skill you develop... or don't. :) I started as an Air Force linguist. Most of what we did had to do with communications interception, not face to face interpreting. You would have your headphone son and be listening to what you were listening to, writing it all down in the special shorthand we learned and you would zone out, disappear into the radio transmission, just ears and the interpreter part of you brain, and your hand writing everything down. It was such a trancelike state that some of the other airmen thought it was funny to sneak up on you and unclip your security badge from you while you were "in the zone". Later when you went out for a smoke break or something, not realizing your badge was missing, the site guards would make you eat pavement until someone came and identified you. That was our version of "fun" in the SCIF. o_O
    Wreybies, Mar 4, 2014
      obsidian_cicatrix, KaTrian and Alesia like this.
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