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Tabitha Dimas

SPAN 3341

Dr. Ana Gregorio-Cano

March 19, 2019

There is much more!

What I have learn from our professor Dr. Ana Gregorio-Cano in my Spanish class,

Introduction to Interpreting, is that it takes much more than being bilingual to be an interpreter.

For a class project, we were assigned in groups to interview a professional interpreter, and thanks

be to God for it, I got to learn the importance of interpreting research, being a faithful conveyor

of the message, and that it’s not shameful to ask about what you don’t know.

Mr. Taylor, a current Interpreter at Children’s Cook Hospital in Forth Worth, Texas, has

been an interpreter for about six years in the medical field. He has taken the interpreter’s

certification from the National Association for Interpreting, completed one of the communities

interpreting 40-hour course, and has taken tests over the names of organs, bones, muscles, and

even the different kinds of seizures both in Spanish and English.

Although I was delighted to know about Mr. Taylor educational background we were

given specific questions to ask in which I was not familiar with. However, now I have a better

understanding about the importance of interpreting research. When I asked,

“What is your current attitude to interpreting research?”

He said, “I know that the career of interpreting here in this country is growing with the

bilingual population or growing of immigrants in this country, …. For example, in community

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interpreting, in other words working in the medical field or schools, in that area where I’ve

worked a lot, I think it’s developed a lot because before it seemed to be pretty informal.”

For him, to describe the growing of bilingual population and of immigrants was interesting to

hear because it will demand more interpreters, but it was more interesting to know how the

interpretation was informal. He stated,

“People didn’t have a whole lot of training in it, and so now we’re taught things like: you

need to make sure that you’re interpreting everything that’s being said, you can’t explain

things that are being said, you have to say them correctly. If you don’t understand

something, you have to ask for clarification from the speaker, whereas before, sometimes

people seemed like they took too much freedom to say things as they thought it should be

said.”

Him saying that pointed out what our professor said that when many see that one is bilingual,

they immediately expect them to interpret without realizing there is a formal training behind it.

Furthermore, being a faithful conveyor of the message was another important fact I

learned and reflected on. Mr. Taylor explained that sometimes in emotional settings the message

doesn’t convey as it should because the family might be angry, so they will mutter under their

breath about the doctor and even doctors can do the same. So, under these circumstances

interpreters “help that communication to be a little bit fairer, clearer between both of them.” It is

the responsibility of the interpreter to interpret everything for the family just as if they were an

English speaker because it is not polite to speak about someone in front of the person without

them understanding. Although, some doctors are opposed to interpreting everything, it is out of

respectfulness that we need to interpret all that is said. Also, a very important lesson Mr. Taylor
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learned from an elder mentor is that it is “so important you communicate with the patient in the

same tone and emotion as the doctor or provider.”

Likewise, another important aspect I reflected on was that it’s not shameful to ask what

you don’t know. Mr. Taylor will ask about what he does not know, even to doctors, about certain

procedures such as how chemotherapy works to be able to interpret more efficiently. He even

asks the cleaning people, or just random people from different cultures, to know how words are

said in different ethnic backgrounds. Amazingly he said, “When I started, I just pretended I was

dumb, and I didn’t know anything, so I was constantly asking, how do you say this in your

country?”

In the final analysis, it takes more to be in interpreter than just being bilingual, although

being bilingual gives you an advantage and shouldn’t be taken for granted, I have learned that an

interpreter has a continual journey in learning how to convey a faithful message while at the

same time asking for clarity on a matter is important.