Life isn’t cheap here, but sometimes things go to sh…: consecutive and simultaneous interpretation

Writing from Guatemala in the 1980s, Jonathan Maslow said that it is not true, as is often said, that life is cheap in Central America, but it is true that life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. I thought about this yesterday when a conversation went completely to shit. (I was talking about this with one of the anesthesiologists today. “It went completely to pieces,” I said. “Kevin, you can say it went to shit,” she said. This and other obscure English expressions discussed at the end of the post.)

There are two basic kinds of interpretation, known as consecutive interpretation and simultaneous interpretation. In consecutive interpretation, the person for whom you are interpreting says something, and when they stop, you repeat it.   In simultaneous interpretation, the person for whom you are interpreting speaks without any pause other than their normal ones, and you repeat what they said immediately, essentially phrase by phrase.

Each form of interpretation has its advantages and disadvantages. I’ll summarize them:

A number of these are relevant to interpreting for Surgicorps, the group with which I’ve come to Guatemala. Here are some specifics:

• “Double interpretation” refers to a situation where the interpreter and the person who speaks the “target language” don’t share a language. This happens on occasion here, and the solution is “double interpretation:” the health care provider speaks in English, the interpreter speaks in Spanish to a second person who speaks Spanish and one of the many indigenous languages, and then that person speaks to the patient in the language that they share—then it goes back in the other direction. This kind of situation has to be handled with consecutive interpretation. (I had a double interpretation situation on screening day. The gentleman who was doing the Spanish <-> indigenous language interpretation had no teeth, and it was a challenge to understand him, even for me.)
• How you can help with the relative slowness of consecutive interpretation if you’re a health care provider: use shorter sentences. If you use long sentences, professional interpreters will often write down notes while you speak. The shorter your sentences, the less need there is for note-taking on the part of the interpreter.

How this all became relevant yesterday: I was interpreting between one of the Surgicorps people and one of the Guatemalan staff. The Surgicorps person was anticipating the end of the local nurse’s sentences while I was still repeating them, and responding in English. So, now I’m speaking a sentence that I’m having to remember in Spanish so that I can interpret it in the Spanish -> English direction, while someone is speaking to me in English. This is the kind of context in which you need two interpreters because you’re basically doing simultaneous interpretation instead of consecutive interpretation: this is the kind of situation where everything immediately goes to shit.

…and that’s when I thought about Maslow on Central America: life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. No problem: the other thing about Central America is that people here know how to make things work in suboptimal conditions. Ask everyone to stop, tell them that you’re having trouble and why, and people will do their best to accommodate—the Americans, as well as the Guatemalans. As is almost always the case: communicate what you need, because the only way to guarantee that you won’t get it is to not tell people what it is.

How about helping our work in Guatemala?  Surgicorps provides free surgical care to people who cannot afford it.  We pay for all of our patients’ costs through the generous donations of the kind of person who would read a blog like this.  Click here to donate–I’m the funny-looking bald guy. 

English notes here—French and Spanish vocabulary below:

• Life is cheap: a delightfully ambiguous expression. The most common interpretation: it’s a way of saying that life is not valued. That’s not to say that people don’t value their own lives, but more that the society doesn’t, in general, value people’s lives. That’s the sense in which it is used in the Maslow quote: it is not true, as is often said, that life is cheap in Central America, but it is true that life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. The other possible interpretation is the more obvious, but the much less common one: it is inexpensive to live. For example: life is cheap in Benin—I think a nice apartment is maybe $50 a month. From the context, it will probably be clear which is which; in case of doubt, the default interpretation is the “life is not valued” one.
• to go to pieces or to go to shit: for a situation to suddenly start going very badly, for things to stop working. To go to pieces is acceptable in pretty much any social context, but to go to shit is very casual and mildly obscene, and you should only use it with peers with whom you are very comfortable. Now: if you’re talking about a person, then to go to pieces (but not to go to shit) has a different meaning. It means something like to stop functioning, perhaps to start crying if you’re talking about an incident; or, if you’re talking about a chronic situation, not to cry, but to stop functioning normally in life. An example of the isolated incident version: I dropped her cell phone and the screen broke, and she completely went to pieces—locked herself in the bathroom and cried for maybe 15 minutes. The chronic one: After his wife died, he completely went to pieces—stopped showering, then stopped showing up for work, got fired, and ended up living with his daughter.

French notes:

• merder: to go to shit, to get complicated.

Spanish notes:

• embolismo: this word does not mean what it looks like—a false cognate. In Spanish it is basically a situation that has gone to shit. The word for “embolism” is embolia, e.g. una embolia cerebral, a cerebral embolism (a kind of stroke).  (The other kind of stroke is a derrame.)