Great advice for all the interpreters out there who are opinionated like me 🙂
Sometimes you think you know better. You hear and understand what’s going on, but when messages are transmitted between the source and target languages, the receiver doesn’t always understand the message. When questions are asked, you may want to answer them since you already know the answers, but guess what, you can’t. Whether the misunderstanding came from your rendition of the message, the speaker’s ambiguity, or the receiver’s own misunderstanding, an interpreter shall not respond on behalf of a speaker nor get involved in side conversations. We must stay within our role as conduits, and only interpret.
As an interpreter, you know that your role is simply to interpret. This means rendering what is said and not what isn’t said. Any omission, addition, or distortion of the original intention of the message should be avoided at all cost. But besides interpreting, an interpreter also has a challenging job, and that…
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Becoming a Translator 