Time Machine: Translation a fine art not easily mastered

 

This story originally appeared in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2016.

TOKYO — One of the most difficult jobs in the world is being an interpreter. Simultaneous translating, for example, requires so much intense concentration and is so exhausting that interpreters at the United Nations will switch off every 20 minutes. 

Japanese–English-Japanese translation is particularly hard because the sentence structure is completely opposite. The subject comes first in English grammar, but the subject comes last in Japanese grammar. Sometimes the translator doesn’t know what the full meaning of the sentence is until the sentence is over and the speaker has gone onto the next sentence. So the interpreter has to translate the sentence and listen and try to comprehend the next sentence at the same time.