Without a doubt, the biggest event to date in the life of the MCI was Critical Link. This international conference on community interpreting is held every three years in a different country. Glendon was fortunate enough to be chosen as the venue for the 7th iteration of the conference, and our event brought over 400 stakeholders – researchers, interpreters, service providers, and clients – from around the world to spend five days with us on our beautiful campus. Conference goers came from over 30 countries, and every continent was represented except Antarctica.
It was a remarkable experience, filled with unforgettable moments. There were nearly 200 parallel presentations, which collectively painted a picture of cutting-edge knowledge in our field, and six different plenary presentations, with each one telling an intriguing story about current developments in the profession. There were the joint workgroup sessions with our sister conference InterpretAmerica, a fantastic gala dinner and harbour cruise aboard the Mariposa Showboat, and lots and lots of networking.
But for one reason or another, three features of the conference deserve special mention, at least to my mind.
1. The Best and Brightest Came to Glendon
On the first day of the conference, I remember getting goosebumps when I saw some of the heavy-hitters of the Interpreting Studies world walking the halls of Glendon. Whether it was Franz Pöchhacker, Robert Pollard, Eric Hardt, Esther Navarro-Hall or Holly Mikkelson, we had gathered on our campus a crowd of people who collectively represented some of the best knowledge in our field. And as exciting as it was to welcome some of the most established trainers and researchers, it was equally inspiring to see a small army of graduate students cutting their paper-giving teeth at Critical Link 7. In addition, there were people from the professional sector who reminded us that important innovations are created off university campuses as well, and the associations and private companies demonstrated their leadership initiatives and breakthroughs in products and services. Seeing all that information and know-how assembled together in one place was breath-taking.
2. We Saw the Future of Interpreting
Over the five days, there was a lot of talk about the direction that interpreting will head in in the future. We heard about new technologies, new ways of training, and new modes of work. But for me, the clearest vision of the future of the profession was to be seen on the faces of my own students. The MCI is a new program, and our first year is taught entirely on line. So while I knew all my students well from interacting with them in real time in our virtual classrooms, I had only every met a handful of them face to face. Critical Link 7 brought almost all of our first cohort together in one place for the first time. What’s more, many of our instructors — who teach remotely from many parts of the world — had their first visit to Glendon during the conference. The photo above captured our students and teachers together in a non-virtual space, and it is a moment that I will remember forever.
3. Plenaries and more Plenaries
I know that the parallel sessions contained a wealth of information about the state of the art. That the product-information sessions offered by our sponsors were a valuable opportunity to learn about what’s happening now on the market. That the pre-conference workshops gave professionals a rare chance to improve their skill sets. But the plenary sessions, I thought, really brought the house down. Perhaps this is because this was the part of the conference that I worked most closely on, or perhaps because so much thought and planning went into them. For whatever reason, it was the plenary sessions that left the strongest mark on me. Here are but some of the highlights.
Lessons to be learned from conference interpreting?
For this session, we gathered together representatives from some of the world’s most prominent conference interpreting services: the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Government of Canada, and the International Monetary Fund. And the session was kicked off by an address from the President of the Association internationale des interprètes de conférence, Linda Fitchett. We heard about how conference interpreting grew as a profession and achieved important milestones. For example, Ian Andersen recalled how European Commission interpreters organized work action to protest unsafe working conditions — in this case, a labyrinthine set of hallways behind the interpreting booths that led to a single and unusable fire exit. It was the first time, but not the last time, we would hear about the power of organizing. But perhaps most important was the fact that conference interpreters and community interpreters engaged in dialogue. Not so long ago, there was obvious friction between the two groups of professionals, so to see members of both sides of the equation engaged in a meaningful exchange of ideas was an encouraging sign of positive change.
Interpreting for Indigenous Communities
It’s clear that language plays a central role in the preservation of aboriginal culture, knowledge, and ways of being. So we were very pleased to bring together four people who had positive stories of hope to tell about aboriginal communities making important strides forward through language interpretation. Victor Sosa of Natividad Medical Center told how Trique and Mixteco speakers had previously been invisible in his hospital, and how he and others had recognized the need for aboriginal interpretation and had found creative ways to put it in place. Martha Flaherty had the room in laughter as she recounted how her experiences interpreting from Inuktitut to English in the Senate of Canada had led her to understand that English is “a very limited language”. Vera Houle of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network spoke about the challenges of providing colour commentary in aboriginal languages during the Vancouver Olympics, and Arnaq Grove described a new university program that trains translators and interpreters of West Greenlandic.
The Hot-Button Topics in Interpreting
The world of professional interpreting has faced disruption in recent times as three “elephants in the room” have introduced changes that have people struggling to react. Whether its the advent of technology, the growing interest in interpreting from the corporate sector, or the growing demand for interpreting in the military and intelligence apparatus, few interpreters remain indifferent. So we were pleased when three thought leaders in interpreting agreed to share their perspectives on the “hot-button topics. First up was Cyracom‘s Jonathan Levy, who noted that the demand for interpreting in key sectors is on the rise, but also becoming more complex. As he put it, “providing interpreters in languages of lesser diffusion can be like looking for albino parrots in Alaska — they’re hard to find and likely don’t exist”. Following this, InterpretAmerica Co-President Katharine Allen explained that mobile digital technology has allowed horizontal communication to reach around the globe, with the effect that “only language now blocks its path”. The impact of technology will produce radical change and potential opportunities — if they are seized upon — for interpreters. Speaking about seismic changes, Melinda Paras of Paras and Associates asked rhetorically whether interpreters would remain sitting on the sidelines, or whether we would organize together to “move from powerless to powerful”.
Interpreting in Conflict Zones
Few of the sessions moved the audience more than our look at those who put themselves in harm’s way to interpret. We heard first off from Tim Laidler, a veteran of Canada’s Armed Forces who now runs the Veteran’s Transition Network. Following a tour of duty in Afghanistan, Laidler blew the whistle on the fact that men and women who risked their lives in Afghanistan were being left behind. As he put it, “I couldn’t proceed with my own integration back into civilian life knowing that my interpreter colleagues had been abandoned”. Ghulam Wali Noori was one of those Afghan interpreters who has begun a new life in Canada, and he noted with sobering effect that “only four of the 10 interpreters I bunked with during my training are still alive”. Lt.(N) Amardeep Singh explained how circumstances thrust him into the role of interpreter while deployed in the Gulf of Oman, and he noted that he often had to “make a call home to Mom” to figure out marine jargon in Urdu. Finally, AIIC President Linda Fitchett, who also runs the AIIC Project to Help Interpreters in Conflict Zones, brought these sobering realities home when she provided the grisly figures on the survival rates of interpreters in conflict zones, and the scant attention these have received from most national authorities.
Long story short, Critical Link 7 was an eye-opening event that left an indelible impression on the students and faculty of Glendon’s MCI. It also helped introduce our program to an army of peers from around the globe. As Critical Link 7 came to a close, we all began to count down to the next iteration of this wonderful event, which will take place in Edinburgh in 2016. But between now and then, there will be many more stories to tell about the life of the MCI at Glendon. Stay tuned!
Posted on July 26, 2013 by Andrew Clifford
