Approaches to interpreting from SOV>SVO (e.g. Japanese>English)

Hi! Welcome to the Complete Interpreter podcast by the Interpreting Coach.

Why 'Complete Interpreter'? Because you're not just a translation machine, you're also a person and a business owner, and I hope to help you take a 360 view of yourself and share some great tried-and-tested strategies to improve your interpreting skills, mindset, use of target language, and marketing.

In this episode, I talk about the strategies you might consider when interpreting from a language with a Subject-Object-Verb word order (e.g. Japanese) into a language with a Subject-Verb-Object order.

Look out for a rare outing from my German! 😁 There's a whole section you will probably want to skip [from 14:41 to 23:25] if you don't have German in your language combination. For those of you who want to brave it, here's the sentence I discuss:
"Trotz freundlichem Lächeln fürs Foto war den beiden Briten, angesichts des geänderten Blicks auf die Berge, eher zum Heulen zumute."

Let me know what you'd like me to talk about next!
 
Sophie (aka The Interpreting Coach)

Chapters

• 0:45 Intro
• 4:30 Strategy 1: waiting
• 7:10 Strategy 2: stalling
• 10:49 Strategy 3: anticipation
• 12:32 Strategy 4: salami technique (chunking)
• 14:41 Long example (skip if you don't understand German)
• 23:25 Exercises to help you improve anticipation and salami technique
• 29:23 Example of a long Japanese sentence & salami technique
• 31:36 Outro and thanks

Transcript

THIS IS A ROUGH AND READY TRANSCRIPT. PLEASE DON'T EXPECT PERFECTION. THERE ARE SEVERAL GRAMMAR & PUNCTUATION MISTAKES - I'm just providing the text for your convenience.

Hello. Welcome to this episode of the Complete Interpreter Podcast by me, Sophie Llewellyn Smith, otherwise known as The Interpreting Coach. It's good to be back. I haven't been recording podcasts for a little while, so I'm enjoying getting back to it. Why is my podcast called The Complete Interpreter?

Because you are more than just an interpreting machine, and so I like to talk about a variety of topics on this podcast, from interpreting skills to Mindset and stress management. And somewhere in the middle of that is the marketing episodes that I have yet to get round to. Today I'm giving you an episode about interpreting skills.

And first of all, I want to tell you why I've decided to tackle this subject. I was giving a webinar recently to a group of Japanese interpreters, and I had a really lovely chat with the colleague who was organizing this webinar, and [00:01:00] we were talking about what would be most useful for that group of Japanese interpreters and what I should talk about.

So we were bandying about various suggestions. Should I talk about articles because that's particularly difficult? And in the end, She said, one of the difficulties interpreting between Japanese and English is the sentence structure. There's a different word order. And she told me something that I didn't know about Japanese, which is that Japanese is an S O V language.

Subject, object, verb. Whereas English is an SVO language. Subject, verb, object. As you will know, if you've taken any of my courses about consecutive interpreting, where, when I discuss note taking, I talk about laying out your notes in an SVO order. Although I do say, You can adapt that if you like to a different word order in a different language, target language.[00:02:00] 

Anyway, I did not know that Japanese had an S O V word order. And so I thought that was a really interesting question and I began to think about how I could address it and whether I had anything to say about the difficulties of interpreting between S O V and S V O and how I could possibly make suggestions for improvements and then it occurred to me that actually I do know something about this Because although it's a little bit different This is a challenge that does come up sometimes when you're interpreting between German and English and I have German in my language combination Now the default word order in German is It is S V O, but sometimes, depending on what's happening in that sentence, if there's a relative clause for example, or particularly if you have a verb in the what in English would be a present perfect tense for example, they have said, in [00:03:00] German you can end up with sentences where the auxiliary have is separated.

from the said, and the said is right at the end of the sentence. That does present similar challenges to an S O V language, in the sense that the verb is at the end of what could be a really long sentence if the speaker has taken many detours along the way. I thought, okay, I probably do have something to say about this topic, although, be warned, I may be reading out or quoting some German sentences, which is something that nobody wants to hear.

But but it may be, I don't know, a good way to illustrate the point that I'm trying to get across. We'll see if I can bear to speak German on mic and if you can bear to listen to me. I certainly won't be speaking any Japanese, although my brother has been learning Japanese for years, so I actually consulted him for this podcast episode.

as [00:04:00] well. SVO into SOV. And what I'm really going to do in this podcast episode is try to focus on strategies, interpreting strategies to allow you to navigate this challenge. And as I see it, there are four main strategies. There are four things that you could do if faced with, let's say for the sake of argument, a really long sentence in Japanese, where the verb is at the end.

And by the way, I'm not the only person to have identified these four things, because I was interested to see, when I did a little bit of research, that Kilian Sieber, the great interpreter and trainer, identified these very strategies in a paper in 2011. But the first one, perhaps the most obvious one that I was discussing with the organizer of this webinar.

When I said to her what do you do? She said sometimes I wait. So your first [00:05:00] strategy as an interpreter is to wait until you have the complete sentence or the complete idea, because maybe you don't feel safe jumping in before then. You don't have the whole picture, all the information that you need in order to make a sentence in English.

So that is something that you could do. You could just wait. With each of these strategies, I want to discuss the pros and cons. The pros of waiting until the very end of a sentence are obvious. I've just listed them. You can hear more. You get the whole picture. That allows you to craft a sentence.

It's a sentence in the target language that is well formed. It also means that you can avoid false starts, where you start the sentence one way and then oops you have to course correct because the sentence doesn't end in Japanese the [00:06:00] way that you expected and then you've messed it up and you have to start over in English.

And this technique will also help you avoid language interference, if you like. Grump. Between Japanese and English, that's unlikely to be semantic interference, words that sound the same. It's more likely to be interference in terms of grammar, but there is a big disadvantage of using this strategy, and the big disadvantage is you're waiting.

If the sentence is really long, you're waiting a very long time, so there's going to be a long pause in your interpreting, and that can sound It can make you sound disjointed. It can make the audience worry that you're leaving information out. In fact, it might mean that you do leave some information out, because if you've had to wait that long to get to the verb, maybe in the middle there have been two or three mini ideas, and then you've forgotten one of them, or you can't fit them in before you have to [00:07:00] move on to interpreting the next bit.

You could end up with something that sounds a little bit like mini consecutives, and that is not complete. That was strategy one. Strategy two, which I also discussed with my webinar organiser, what is, was stalling, playing for time, where essentially you are still waiting, but instead of leaving a really long gap, you're filling in some or all of that gap.

with neutral things that allow you to stay in a holding pattern until the plane lands. That's the analogy of an aeroplane that doesn't have a landing slot yet at the airport, and so it just has to circle round around the airport until it's time to land. And sometimes when I'm interpreting from German, I do feel like that, that I'm circling and waiting for that landing slot when I actually hear the verb.

You can [00:08:00] do that. Some people do that. Indeed the person I was speaking to said that she does that sometimes. And what then do you fill in with? What can you stall with? You can say things that are relatively neutral. and not wrong, and that don't really add any more information to what you've said already.

You could repeat something that you've already said, or paraphrase it slightly. You could fill in with something totally meaningless, so this is a place where sometimes interpreters might just say something like ladies and gentlemen, even though the speaker hasn't said it. By the way, I'm not necessarily suggesting that this is a brilliant technique.

Or you could In simultaneous, draw out what you can say and say it in several pieces. Because in simultaneous you can add information, you can never take it away, but you can add [00:09:00] information. So instead of giving one sentence to give some information, you could give two or three and just add a little bit extra each time while you're waiting for the jackpot.

The important thing here is to say things that are plausible, that are grammatically correct, and where you don't commit. If your speaker is slow, And wordy, then, hey, that's an opportunity for you to match that wordy style. Normally, I'm always telling people to be concise and simultaneous, so that they can keep up with speed if their speaker is fast.

But this is an opportunity where you could be relatively wordy if your speaker is. Obviously, if your speaker is concise, You're not really matching the same effect if you go very waffly. And indeed on the downside, that is one of the risks of the stalling technique, that you're going to sound [00:10:00] waffly, that perhaps you're going to lose clarity that your audience won't be able to see the wood for the trees.

And it can be quite frustrating for the listener, I think, to have a lot of words, but not really an interpreter who's getting to the point. So that's the downside. And I think having discussed it with the interpreter who was organizing the webinar, she said I think I've got into a habit of doing that to cope with the SOV word structure in Japanese, but actually it doesn't always produce the best result for the audience.

So maybe this is a technique to be used judiciously. You can use it sometimes, but I think if you did it, If you're going to repeat it all the time then I'm not sure the output would be optimal for the audience. Technique number three is anticipation. This is where you say what the speaker is going to say before they do.

So in [00:11:00] effect you're guessing, but it's an educated guess. As to what the end of the sentence is going to be. Now the advantage of that is that you retain a smooth delivery. You don't have these long gaps. If you're going to anticipate, it means that you're bringing all your analytical skills to bear, which is always a good thing.

On the downside, of course, if you anticipate and speak before the speaker, then the chance is that you're going to make mistakes. You may get it completely wrong, as I have done in my time in German, because sometimes The verb was coming, I anticipated the verb, and I did not know or guess that the speaker was going to put a nicht, a not, just before the verb.

And so I, at that point, had said the opposite of what the speaker said. And then, how can you correct that while still sounding competent as an [00:12:00] interpreter? Jokingly, I say that sometimes I could have said, Chairman, we can go along with this proposal. Or not. I never did it quite like that. Let me reassure you.

But yes, that is tricky. You may make mistakes and sometimes it just isn't possible to guess. You don't have enough information, either background information about current events or knowledge of this particular topic speaker's and so you can't always guess. Those are the downsides. Final technique that I'm going to mention is salami technique.

Again, using the salami technique, which is about chopping up long sentences into something shorter chunks, allows you to avoid lengthy pauses. It also means that you have to work really hard to analyze the material, which I think is a good thing. It produces something that is digestible for the audience.

instead of [00:13:00] long, rambling sentences where they might get lost. Is there a downside to salami technique? I would argue that when it's done well, there aren't many downsides. It takes practice, and the downsides that people normally mention to me are that they're worried that if they use salami technique, they're going to leave out some information, and that they're worried that it will sound childish because adults don't speak like that.

To which I would say adults don't write like that. Normally in writing, we have a slightly more formal style with longer and more convoluted sentences. But actually when we speak, we don't always make super long and complicated sentences, and I also think that if you have simple grammar, but sophisticated and appropriate vocabulary, then you won't sound uneducated or childish.

You're just making life easier for the audience and for your relay takers. And the other concern that people [00:14:00] sometimes raise is that they will sound, sound disjointed because they're chopping up into little pieces. And there, it's true to say that if you're going to use salami technique, you have to remember to not just chop up, but also to chop up.

Reinsert the logical connectors between ideas. And I think when I hear beginners at Simultaneous, using salami technique, that is one of their difficulties. That they tend to chop up, but they don't always reconstitute the logical thread of the original. So you've got to practice building up again. Not just chopping, but re building.

Okay, let me see if I can use a German example to talk about These four techniques and what you might end up with. Anyone who doesn't have German in their combination, switch off. Anyone who doesn't want to hear German mangled in my English accent, then switch off. [00:15:00] And here is my sentence. It comes from an article about two British tourists who went back to the Alps 15 years after their first trip to the same glacier and they took a photo in the same position exactly to compare the effects of global warming, basically.

And here's a sentence I found in this article, which was on Deutsche Welle. It says, Trotz freundlichem lächeln fürs Foto War dem beiden Briten, angesichts der geänderten Blicks auf die Berge, eher zum Heulen zumute. How was that? Have you survived that? I don't often speak German, certainly not in public.

Now, if we were doing the waiting technique, here's what we would have. By the way, I suppose I should translate that sentence for you. Otherwise, it's going to make no sense whatsoever to people who don't understand German. So if I were translating it more or less word for word or in the [00:16:00] same order, it would say, despite a friendly smile for the photo, it was to the two Brits in light of the changed view over the mountains rather for crying.

The meaning being they're smiling for the photo. but half of the glass here has disappeared and so it made them want to cry. Okay, if we were using the waiting technique, I think we would be able to jump in After the first unit of meaning where it says Trotz freundlichem lächeln fürs Foto and we could say despite a happy smile for the photo.

Then we're going to hear it was to the two British people because of the changed view of the mountains. At that point we have to wait, we don't have a verb, we don't know quite yet. What is happening to the two British people? We wait, until we hear the very end of the sentence, which says, It made [00:17:00] them want to cry.

Clearly, we're going to have a long gap. Next option is stalling. Okay, how can we stall here? Let's say we've already said, Despite a happy smile for the photo. And now we have to stall. What can we say? So maybe we repeat something we've already said, or we paraphrase it. And you can see the two Brits here on the photo smiling. Maybe you could say something like that.

Technique three is anticipation. All right. How can we apply our anticipation skills here? We're hearing despite a friendly smile for the photo. Therefore, we conclude that on the photo they look happy, but in reality they must not be happy. We could say something like, despite a happy smile on the photograph, at that point we're hearing it was to the two British [00:18:00] people in the light of the changed view.

At that point we could say the two British tourists were devastated. And by that time, we've probably heard the end of the sentence, and we can insert, because the view behind them had changed so much. Okay, the risk there is that we've had to pick an adjective. So I've said devastated, but I don't know really what the end of the sentence was.

So maybe you're going to get the emphasis wrong. You're going to get a nuance wrong. You'll say something that's too strong or not strong enough. If it's not strong enough, you can add something. So let's say I, I said despite smiling happily for the camera, the two British tourists were disappointed when they saw what had happened to the glacier.

In fact, it made them want to cry. In fact, they were devastated. So there you can see the technique of adding, how you can add a little bit in simultaneous, just to specify, just [00:19:00] to make what you've said more accurate compared to the original. And the last possibility is salami technique. Okay, so with salami technique, I listen to my first unit of meaning, despite a friendly smile for the camera.

And I want to turn that into an independent utterance, because that is the point of salami technique. So I want it to be a sentence in itself. So I'm not going to say despite, because despite is a subordinating conjunction, and I don't want any of those. I want open syntax. In other words, independent clauses connected together with conjunctions like and, but, and I'm going to say,

The two Brits have a sm Blah! Let me try that again. The two Brits are smiling happily for the camera. Or, the two Brits had a friendly smile for the camera. That's full stop. Then I'm hearing, In light of the changed view of the mountains.

I'm going to use my analytical skills to remember [00:20:00] that there was the word Trotz, which means despite. So I know that although they look happy, they must be unhappy. And my next unit of meaning is about the view, so I could say something like the view behind them, or the view over the mountains, had, has changed enormously.

And by then I've heard the bit about, And I can say, Or, they were devastated by the change. Okay, so I hope that example illustrates the pros and cons of the different techniques. Perhaps an even longer sentence would have illustrated that even more. Just to give you two more examples from German, I've got some long sentences here.

One begins, Das Wilson Center in Washington hat bereits 2020 in eine Studie die Desinformation gegen 13 Politikerinnen etc and so it goes on. [00:21:00] If you're trying to do salami technique you don't need to wait for the verb which comes two lines later and it is analysiert because instead so translation for those without German, it says the Wilson Center in Washington has already in 2020 In a study, the disinformation against three female politicians.

I don't need to hear the verb, which, as it happens, is analyzed, because I already have a unit of meaning. I have understood that there is a study. I've understood that study came out in 2020, or the Wilson Center in Washington said something about the study in 2020, and that the study is about disinformation.

involving 13 female politicians. So I've already got lots of information and so I don't need to listen to any more before starting to speak. For example, I could say a study came out in 2020 [00:22:00] or I could say a study by the Wilson Center in Washington came out in 2020.

Lots of options. Here's another example of a sentence in German, which begins Neben der Erkenntnis, dass geschlechtsspezifische Desinformationsnarrative insgesamt stark verbreitet sind, kam heraus, dass sich 78 percent der gefundenen Schlüsselwörter auf die damalige Senatorin bezogen. Okay, so again for people without German, it says alongside the finding that gender based disinformation narratives are widespread overall, it emerged that and then the verb is at the end.

And in English, you could translate the end as it was found that 78 percent of the keywords referred to the then senator. Now, if I were dealing with a sentence [00:23:00] like that, which begins. In addition to the finding that gender based disinformation narratives are widespread, I wouldn't even begin in addition to.

I would use Salami technique to express independently, as a standalone sentence, the fact that gender based disinformation narratives are widespread overall and that is a finding. Okay, I don't want to go too far into Salami technique because I want to wrap up this podcast episode by talking about some exercises that you can do to practice anticipation and salami technique.

So first of all, anticipation. You have various ways of anticipating. guessing what's coming next. Some of them are based on extra linguistic cues. In other words, things that are not in the language, things like the speaker's intonation or the speaker's body language, their facial expression. And then you've got the ones that are part of the language, for [00:24:00] example, connectors.

If you hear things like alongside, you know that there are going to be two items. If you hear on the one hand, you know that there's going to be an, on the other hand, if you hear a despite, as we did just now, You know that there's going to be a a contrast. Okay. So here are some exercises that you can do with a text.

Choose an opinion piece from a newspaper, for example, read through the first paragraph and the first few words of paragraph two, and then cover up the rest. Guess what that paragraph two is going to cover. Then uncover it. Oh, my use of cover and uncover is a bit confusing there. Then lift your hand so that you can read the rest of paragraph two and see if you were right.

And then read the first few words of paragraph three, put your hand over the text, guess what comes next. Another exercise that you can do to practice anticipation [00:25:00] is with a partner. Get your partner to choose a text that contains some good collocations. In other words, phrases where the words go well together.

For example

in a something market, prices tend to fall. If you know some vocabulary around the economy, then you would say in a bear market. And what you want to do is get your partner to read out the sentence and stop halfway through the collocation and you have to guess the other half of the collocation. So that's an exercise to help you practice semantic, linguistic anticipation.

It's not based on what you know about the speaker or about the world, it's about the actual language and which bits of language go together. A couple of exercises that you can do orally. Working in pairs or in a group, you can do a sentence finishing exercise. You pick a topic. The [00:26:00] first person begins a sentence and stops halfway through.

The next person has to finish it in a way that is grammatically correct and makes sense and is plausible. And then they begin sentence two, and the next person has to finish it. On you go, round and round in a circle. It is an anticipation exercise in the sense that you have to say things that make sense, but you may, of course, not say exactly what the original speaker had in mind.

But that's very much like doing simultaneous. We don't always say exactly what the speaker had in mind for the end of that sentence. We try and convey the same idea, but maybe not in the same sentence. Another exercise that you can do is to choose an interview, a video of an interview, for example, with two people.

You listen to the question and then listen to the first few words of the answer. Then press pause and see if you can guess where the speaker is going with their answer. And then obviously you can press play and [00:27:00] check. For practicing salami technique I could mention several exercises. The most Obvious one is, first of all, being able to identify units of meaning.

Those collections of words that make up an idea. Something that could be a standalone sentence. For that, you can choose a text in your A language or a B language, if you have one. Go through it with a pen and draw a forward slash. When you come to a unit to the end of a unit of meaning So that visually you can see where the units of meaning are and the fact that they don't always coincide with a sentence Just going back to my example of the despite smiling happily for the camera That is not a sentence, but it is a unit of meaning You can also do this with a video you listen to the video every time You hear the end of a unit of meaning, you tap on the table.

And then you can take that one step further with your text. [00:28:00] Once you've gone through and identified units of meaning, you can take each unit of meaning and rephrase that idea out loud as a standalone sentence. See how many ways you can come up with to express that idea. If you're working with a speech, press pause after each unit of meaning and then reformulate the idea out loud as a standalone sentence.

Working with a text, you can do sight translation and change any subordinate clauses into open syntax. That's to help you practice open syntax, changing the syntax, which is part of Salami technique. Again, working with sight translation, you can begin every idea, every sentence, in a different place from the original.

And actually, you can do that with a text. You can also do that with an audio file or a video. Your goal is to begin your sentence with a different idea from the speaker's. For example, [00:29:00] with my British tourist smiling in front of the glacier, I, if I were doing this exercise, I would not be allowed to begin the sentence with the smiling happily for the camera.

I'd have to start somewhere else in the sentence. And that gets you used to moving the puzzle pieces around. Okay, hopefully that's given you lots of ideas. I just want to finish with, if I can find it, a Japanese sentence.

Let me see if I can find that sentence for you.

Okay. This is a long sentence given to me again by the delightful organiser of my recent webinar.

She's given me a literal translation of this. This sentence and it would go like this. The new UK government took office after the first Japan, the UK and Italy defence ministers met the three [00:30:00] countries underway. The next generation of fighter aircraft develop by 2035 deployment, continue working on agreed.

First of all, I found that absolutely fascinating as an insight into. Japanese sentence structure and the way that the language slots together. Obviously, if you were interpreting, you'd have to do that totally differently in English to get some kind of SVO order in there. And so you'd have to use salami technique.

And one way that you could begin that sentence would be after the new administration took office. So the Japanese says the new UK government took office after. So you could swap that round. And then say, For the first time, Japan, the UK and Italy met at defence ministers level. And so it goes on. I'll put these sentences in the show notes, perhaps.

But even then, you could do more salami [00:31:00] technique. For example, instead of saying, After the new UK administration took office, which begins a sentence, but you don't know how that sentence is going to finish because you haven't heard enough. You don't know how long it's going to be. You don't know into how many chunks you're going to have to chop it.

So if you're using salami technique, you can turn that into a standalone sentence and just say something like, there's a new government in the UK or a new government has just taken office in the UK. Full stop. That frees your mind to listen to the next part of the Japanese. and chunk it up into something usable in English.

Okay, I think that's all that I am going to say today about how you can approach turning S O V languages into more of an S V O order when interpreting. As usual, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you are an interpreter working from Japanese into English, how do you tackle these [00:32:00] things? Do you have some lovely tips to share?

If so, please email me on info at the interpreting coach dot com. There's also a very short form in the show notes where you can tell me what you'd like me to talk about next. And it really is just one question. What would you like me to talk about next? So feel free to fill that in. Hope to speak to you soon.

Take care.