There’s something kind of amazing that happens to a piece of literature when it is read aloud. It’s difficult to describe, but almost as if the words are transformed from something static into a living, breathing presence simply by being read aloud. I found this especially true during the reading and reception held to celebrate the release of the newest issue of Absinthe: World Literature in Translation this past Friday.This latest issue, “Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest”, showcases the work of contemporary Armenian authors who produce literature and poetry from across the Armenian diaspora.

Michael Pifer reads his translation of “Aleppo, Aleppo” by Maroush Yeramian

The issue is made even more special because it is one of the few collections of this type of work available today. What made this event particularly exceptional for me, and I suspect the rest of the attendees, is knowing that each of the readers had personally translated and edited the very work that they were reading.

Tamar Boyadjian, guest editor and contributor for “Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpset”

Having read through the entire issue a few times before this event, I considered myself fairly familiar and rather fond of its contents. However, I was unprepared by how much my appreciation and understanding of each piece would grow after hearing them read aloud. Maybe it was the fact that every word read was one that had been the focus of considerable deliberation that made these readings so meaningful. Or perhaps it is that each voice provided a depth of emotion and inflection that simply cannot be replicated in print. Whatever it was, I’m glad so many people had the chance to see months of work come together.

Silke-Maria Weineck, general editor of Absinthe: World Literature in Translation

In addition to my blog posts chronicling translation projects taking place across campus, I have also worked as the undergraduate intern for Absinthe over the past semester, hence my familiarity with the issue. So this event was certainly doubly exciting for me! While I certainly wasn’t in the middle of any huge decisions regarding the journal, I had chance to witness how translation efforts come together at the most formal levels. Primarily, this involved an astounding level of collaboration and communication to ensure all contributors were on the same page and pleased with the final product.

Along with many things I learned about coordinating so many moving pieces and meeting often-difficult deadlines, my experience as an intern is especially valuable to me because it gave me a way to contextualize what I was learning about less-formal translation projects. I had the chance to speak to a variety of people on campus who are involved in some sort of translation work, whether it’s through a hobby, internship, or career. What has emerged to me from these conversations and from my experiences with Absinthe is that translation takes on a variety of different forms in daily. Rather more importantly, I’ve also found that each of these forms is uniquely valuable and valid.

Sometimes translation serves a highly practical role, as it did for Translate-a-Thon participants or medical interpreters. Here, perhaps, function outweighs grace to a certain extent, but that is not to say it is a cruder form. In a hospital, it’s absolutely vital that patients receive the most important information. But balancing that important duty with compassion for a patient’s situation is both a skill and an art. Other times, the aim of translation is to create a piece of art or to preserve a historical perspective. The process here is much more extensive and strategic, as was illustrated during my work with Absinthe and conversation with Kristin Datta.  

Regardless of where it happens, translation is a key facet of everyday life, and one I am glad I had the chance to explore over the past few months. And with that, my series comes to an end. Thank you to everyone that shared their experiences with me and to everyone who has provided guidance along the way.

— Anjali Alangaden

Minoring in Translation Studies is perhaps not the most typical choice for an undergrad hoping to go into medicine. And over the past couple years, I have often been asked how I see these two seemingly distinct fields of study interacting. But for me, the connections between translation and medicine are both clear and increasingly important.

On a daily basis, most physicians find themselves interacting with people from diverse backgrounds and identities. Sometimes that means working with patients who may not understand English or who struggle with comprehending often complicated medical jargon. Being an effective and compassionate health care provider requires physicians to bridge these communication divides. If that isn’t translation at work, I don’t know what is!

To further explore how translation and medicine interact, I spoke to Megumi Segawa, who has worked as a Japanese Healthcare Interpreter in the University of Michigan Health System since 2007.

Could you describe a little bit what medical interpreters do and how they function within the medical system?

Interpreter Services is a department at Michigan Medicine and we provide free interpreting services for patients with limited English and deaf and hard of hearing patients.  Staff interpreters are available for Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Russian and American Sign Language.  Basically we show up at the patient’s appointment and work with them throughout the medical encounter.  We provide assistance at check-in, in-take, doctor visit, check-out, various testing and procedures, ER visits, and Labor & Delivery.

How long have you been working with the medical interpreters? How does someone get involved in this field? 

I have been working as a staff Japanese interpreter since 2007 but started to work as a temp interpreter a few years before that.  I had interpreting experiences in other fields before I joined Interpreter Services and learned about medicine and medical interpreting though training sessions and online.  There’s a 40-hour medical interpreter training program called Bridging The Gap and that is something everyone must have before working as a healthcare interpreter.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced as an interpreter?

Interpreting for terminally ill patients are always difficult.  Similarly interpreting for parents whose baby/child has serious problems is also very tough.  What is hard in those situations is that you feel as if you were delivering “bad news.”  On top of that, you also have to voice the reaction to the news, so you end up feeling everyone’s pain.

How many interpreters are active in UMHS and how many languages do you accommodate?  

I think we have about 100 interpreters including staff interpreters and temp interpreters.  We have many temp interpreters for languages other than the 7 foreign languages I mentioned in Q1 such as Romanian, Polish, Greek, Somali, and Hindi.  When there is no in-person interpreter available, we provide phone interpreting services through an outside agency.

Are there any other things you’d like to add?

We also translate medical records and patient education materials for providers and patients.  Translation and interpretation are rather different things.  Just like not all bilingual people are good at interpreting, not all interpreters are good translators and visa versa.

-Interview by Anjali Alangaden

I first met Kristen Datta in a freshman seminar during January of 2015. We were both pretty interested in languages and were both considering pursuing a major in Linguistics. One thing that I immediately found fascinating about Kristen was her interest in learning both Japanese and German, a pair of languages that were completely foreign to me. As I was studying Portuguese at the time, another not-so-common language on campus, we quickly connected over our interest in languages and our struggles to understand the often painfully dense literature we were discussing in class.

In the three years that followed, I’ve had at least one class with Kristen every semester — honestly not that unusual of an occurrence in the Linguistics Department — and every semester I have learned a little bit more about her. For example, she comes from a family of science-minded individuals, but has branched out to pursue a dual major in Linguistics and German. I also found out that her grandmother was Japanese, which guided her interest in learning that language. And as I discovered just a couple months ago, Kristen is also doing an internship with a nonprofit called the World War II History Project that aims to discover and preserve the firsthand accounts of participants and survivors of World War II.

First off, could you describe the project that you’re working on?

So the project is for an organization called the World War II History Project. It covers interviews with a lot of different sorts of World War II veterans, but a decent number of them were German prisoners of war in the United States actually. So they were captured in North African and brought to the US as prisoners of war. We have these video interviews, but no transcripts – so I’ve been doing a lot of transcribing for sure. My supervisor is writing a history book on this, although I’m not sure about all of the details. So a lot of what I’ve been doing is mainly focused on these German prisoners of war.

How did you find out about this project and get involved?

It was actually through the German Department, you know those weekly emails about all the things going on in the department. Well, they had this list of internships and stuff so I sent in my application and did a Skype interview.  And then, yeah, it worked out!

So this is clearly part of a larger project. Is this based primarily in the US or somewhere else?

Yeah it’s based mostly out of the US. My supervisor’s in Florida, I think. But some of the other people working on this are in Germany.

How much time do you put in per week?

During the summer I was doing a lot more, obviously. I usually did a few hours a day then, but recently I haven’t been working on it as much. Coursework and all that stuff kind of gets in the way, but I’m still working on it here and there when I can2

Of all of the things you’ve translated, what do you think is maybe the most interesting?

I know a decent amount about World War II history through my German studies and history classes in general. But it’s really interesting to have a perspective from the prisoners of war, especially the Africa campaign because that’s not a lot of what I know about. I guess also, it’s personally interesting to me to here about this as well because my grandmother was Japanese-American, and she was actually in internment here in the US…so kind of looking at the comparison of how Japanese-American citizens were treated in internment camps versus prisoners of war. It’s also interesting because these interviews

Can you tell me a little bit about the videos you’ve been working on?

The main guy whose interviews I’ve been working on, well he was an interpreter so he speaks both German and English very fluently. The only problem is that he switches back and forth between the languages throughout the interviews. You know, it’s kind of fun to see the ways he incorporates the languages and how he talk about specific things. Also, my military vocabulary has become a TON bigger.

Oh that’s interesting! Tell me a little more about that.

Yeah, the worst is definitely place names! So like I said, he was part of the Africa campaign which I’m not that familiar with. So I’m trying to use all these clues like ‘I know they’re in Tunisia, and this name sort of sounds like this so…?’ I usually end up Googling a name that I think I heard and look at maps, trying to see what things like cities and lakes and bays that they’ve referenced. But yeah, thankfully my supervisor knows the history of this way better than I do and she did all of the interviews, so she can give me a lot more information than I would have otherwise. Also, a lot of times they use the German names for locations, so I really have to backtrack and try to recreate the German pronunciation and spelling.

You’re a German major, right? Have you found that you linguistics background has helped you in this?

I’m mostly relying on my German honestly. I like to think that it helps, but one of the nice things about German, at least, is that the spelling is a little more understandable. The spelling and pronunciation aren’t exactly the same, but at least they’re close. If there’s a word I don’t know, I can usually just transcribe it how I think it’s spelled and then refine as I go.

You’ve probably listened to quite a few hours of footage at this point. Is there anything he’s said that particularly stuck out to you?

I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t really know in general. I think it’s also really interesting to hear how his work as a translator in the prisoner camps kind of affected how he interacted with both Americans and the German prisoners of war. After the war, he actually ended up living in the United States for quite a few years actually, so I think it’s kind of interesting to see how he went from being a prisoner of war to being a long-term resident of the country that captured him. He talks a lot about the fights that did break out or some times that they were mistreated by the guards, but overall, it is an interesting dynamic to look at both the good and the bad interactions and how that influenced his decision to stay in the United States.

-Interview by Anjali Alangaden

Growing up, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a variety of different languages, both within my own family as well as our broader community. Somewhat unluckily, I never managed to learn any of these languages properly. Not that I’m completely hopeless! I can contribute to conversations and (much more importantly) understand all of the family gossip, but neither of these feats is particularly impressive in a family full of polyglots.

My linguistic failings aside, constantly being around several languages had a lot of wonderful effects, including the fact that I was constantly witnessing and experiencing countless moments of informal translation. Whether it was trying to explain the American grading system to my grandparents in India (who still aren’t entirely sure whether getting an ‘A’ is a good or bad thing) or attempting to understand the complex family tree of my Lebanese neighbors, informal translation has been a staple in my life for as long as I can remember.

Not that I ever really realized this fact, as these sorts of mixed interactions are ubiquitous in any multicultural family or community.  It wasn’t until I started taking classes related to my minor in Translation Studies that I began to regard my experiences in a new light. In these courses, I encountered the theories and techniques utilized by translators for the first time. Although the material was primarily aimed at translating literature, the discussions of the obstacles faced by translators — how to preserve cultural context, literal vs. metaphorical translations, engaging a completely new audience — applied to so many of my own experiences.

The more I looked, the more I saw translation at work in almost every imaginable context. I was fascinated by the translation spectrum I began to see emerging. These interactions ranged from extremely formal to quick informal explanations of cultural practices in my ESL class to the months-long intensive translation projects I saw taking place in the Comparative Literature department.

In an effort to explore the sides of translation that are so often overlooked, I will be publishing a month-long series of reflections and interviews with people engaging with translation in new and innovative ways. I hope you’ll enjoy joining me on this exploration of translation across campus!

-Anjali Alangaden