Note from the editor: These are the notes taken 10 years ago by a coleague when attending short-term free courses on interpretation given by AIIC members in Rome. And he came across this note about the fatigue everyone of us often experiences. Thingking this message by Seleskovitch (from late 60s) still holds true even today, he wants me to put it on my webpage and solicite comments from anyone interested in this issue.

Fatigue (experienced by interpreters)

If we add up the number of working hours involved in a day of simultaneous interpretation, we will thus find that productive work accounts for two or three hours a day, or 20,000 words of message, and that listening, just as exacting and responsible a task and as tiring for the interpreter as it is for the participants at a meeting, accounts for three or four additional hours. Finally, there is the preparation which conscientious interpreters do the night before, or even a few days before, by studying the working documents of the meeting.

If one considers, on top of this, that booths have often been designed on the assumption that the interpreter will spend very little time there when in fact they spend entire days there,and that they are, for the most part, poorly ventilated, uncomfortable and difficult to get out of for a breath of fresh air;that the interpreter‘s earphones are often of poor quality, which means the sound must be turned up so high that it causes headaches and acoustic traumas, it is hardly surprising that simultaneous interpretation often yields poor results. It is hardly surprising, either, that most interpreters seek to recuperate as best as they can, leave the booth when they are not working instead of following the discussions, fail to prepare sufficiently, and when fatigue sets in, as is inevitable after the meeting has been in progress for a couple of hours, give up trying to understand altogether, and from then on mechanically recite words that are suggested to them by those they hear in the other language, or even refuse to try and understand (a very understandable tactic of self-preservation).

We will not improve this state of affairs by moral exhortation; no human being is capable of maintaining over a long period of time the effort that good simultaneous interpretation requires. The problem will be solved only when satisfactory working conditions have been established. This means, first and foremost, significantly increasing the number of interpreters hired for a conference and therefore reducing the working time of each interpreter by at least a half. It would follow thus that, at the very least, the number of interpreters would at least be doubled, that a much greater part of the individual interpreter‘s working day would be devoted to preparation and listening, and that the amount of speaking time would be reduced proportionately.

In this way, interpretation could be performed in a manner more consistent with the enormous effort it requires. It would take its place alongside professions that have been recognized as having a certain element of "performance", but an even larger "behind the scenes" side. No one expects teachers, for instance, to be in the classroom 40 hours a week or pianists to give six- or seven-hour concerts every day.

Yet, with interpretation, it should be noted that the enormous mental effort that the interpreter makes and the cramped and poorly ventilated surrounding in which he works constitute a source of fatigue, the long-term consequences of which are bound to make themselves felt sooner or later.

To produce, within a period of time more suited to much less intensive mental activity, a quantity of work that is ten times greater than that of a translator, at a speed that is by necessity 30 times faster, imposes a strain which leads either to serious psychosomatic disorder or, as we said earlier, causes interpreters to shirk their responsibilities and do a bad job.

Modern medical research has established that one can maintain an efficient level of output for no more than 30 minutes at a time on a job that demands close attention and that cannot be performed by conditioned reflexes. This efficient level of output can be maintained for an hour and a quarter on a more repetitive job destined eventually to be performed by machines. Thirty minutes is roughly the amount of time that an interpreter works at a stretch. During this time he processes 4,500 words. Clearly he should have considerable time to recuperate before beginning to work again. For an interpreter to be able to do a good job, his working day would have to be divided into four parts. For every hour of actual speaking time he would devote about three hours to preparation, two to recuperation and one to listening. There‘s still a long way to go...

作者：高丹非 文章来源：凡龙英语