Bridging between worlds of experience
To most people, cheese seems like a simple thing: yet another dairy product. To others, cheese is an important part of their life and culture that means much more to them than simply “dairy”. To still others, cheese is a product they produce, eat, and sell.
I'm still on the farm that I mentioned in my earlier post about milking. Today, a guest arrived at the farm who had lived his childhood in a small mountain village. In this village, they were and still are making a special kind of salted cheese that only exists there.
On the farm where I am now, we are also making cheese: different kinds from cow milk, goat milk, and whey. So quite naturally, the discussion soon revolved around cheese and cheese making.
It quickly became apparent that it is not so easy to talk about cheese making if you are using vastly different frames of reference. While our guest was talking about their cheese making process, and how the cheese was an integral part of their childhood, our farmers applied totally different vocabulary to talk about almost the same things. For example, our guest lived in a cheese making environment as they were a kid, so they experienced all the cheese related things from a very specific perspective. In contrast, our farmers are making cheese by hand professionally, so they are looking at it through a very different lens.
I felt as if I was a perfect fit to bridge the gap between these two different worlds of experience. I knew the cheese making process from the village where our guest grew up from a visit some years ago. Similarly, I knew the cheese making process from the farm where I am now. So I felt as if I could translate and combine the vocabularies, terminologies, and ideational frames of reference among our guest and our farmers.
As it turn out, this is so much harder than it sounds. You have to completely understand the experiences and the background of both parties to actually know what they are talking about. Then you have to translate these experiences and technical terms from one side to the other. All this of course in real time: if you take too long to bridge the gap, people will automatically start to add more information to help you out. This then is information that you also have to translate to a vastly different framework. It gets tricky very fast.
Then I realized: this is quite similar to what simultaneous interpreters are doing in their day-to-day job. They have it even harder: they have to translate while people are talking, and they have to approximate not only different frames of reference but also different languages that may or may not have comparable terminologies.
In the end, we managed to talk about our cheese by showing examples of cheese made at our farm. Our guest then promised to show us their cheese making process by making some cheese for us. I am sure this will be exciting, not only because I love cheese making but also because it will give us another insight into their cultural background and world of experience.
Still, the question remains: how is it humanly possible for interpreters to do this flawlessly every day?