Daniel Greene

Category: Interpreting

Posts about Interpreting/ interpretation, translating/ translation, and transliterating/ transliteration

  • Settings vs. specializations: Categorizing interpreting work

    Interpreter Patricia Stöcklin whispers interpreting to Garry Kasparov. Klaus Bednarz is speaking on the lit.Cologne 2007 Français : L'interpréteur Patricia Stöcklin traduit en chuchotant à Garry Kasparov. Klaus Bednarz parle au lit.Cologne 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
    Interpreter Patricia Stöcklin whispers interpreting to Garry Kasparov. Klaus Bednarz is speaking on the lit.Cologne 2007 Français : L’interpréteur Patricia Stöcklin traduit en chuchotant à Garry Kasparov. Klaus Bednarz parle au lit.Cologne 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Is “freelance” a setting? I’ve heard people say they used to be “educational” and now they’re “freelance.” What they mean is they used to be employed full-time at a school and now they work as an independent contractor for agencies. Yet interpreters can work full-time in schools and be “freelance” if they’re working at that school as independent contractors. By the same token, there are interpreters who work for agencies as full-time employees, and they do doctor’s appointments, business meetings — the same kinds of work as interpreters who call themselves “freelancers.” I think interpreters get their settings and specialties mixed up, and I think it can cause confusion to those entering the field, those who hire us, and even ourselves and each other. Knowing what’s what can give everyone a better understanding of what we do. Here is how I suggest we distinguish interpreting settings from interpreting specialties: (more…)

  • Workshops in Minnesota, November 2012

    Hi, Minnesota! I’m Daniel Greene, and I’m going to be in Minneapolis – St. Paul the weekend of Friday, November 9th and Saturday, November 10th presenting two workshops. The first one, on Friday night from 6pm to 9pm, is about fingerspelling and pronouncing foreign names and words. It’s fascinating all the different spellings and sounds there are in different languages, and in America, in the English language, we have so many sounds from all over the world. And we’ll be talking about spelling rules and sound systems. (more…)

  • Webshop Wednesday – ‘Terps on film: Ethical or entertaining?

    Webshop Wednesday – ‘Terps on film: Ethical or entertaining?

    This Wednesday, July 25th, from 9a-noon Arizona Time (UTC-7:00), I am excited to open my workshop to participants on a Google+ Hangout. Interpreters on Google+ have asked me when I would be offering a workshop online, and this is the second time I am. This workshop costs $30 USD and offers .3 continuing education units (CEUs) through the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf Certificate Maintenance Program (RID CMP). CEUs are sponsored by the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (ACDHH). We will webcast from the Desert Valley’s Regional Co-op in Phoenix, Arizona. This workshop will be conducted in English and is designed for interpreters who interpret into or out of spoken English. (more…)

  • Interpreters beware of “SERVICE NEEDED !!!” scam

    In case you haven’t already seen it, the following email is going around. Gmail was wise enough to put them both in my spam folder. I will quote both so you can see how suspicious they are:

    Here is the first one:

    from: Engr Ivan Bruce bengrivan@gmail.com
    to:
    bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
    date: Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:50 AM
    subject: YOUR SERVICE !!!

    Hello,

    I’m Engr Ivan,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 25th-28th of July to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.

    You can mail me directly on
    IvanBruce@usa.com
    Await your reply.
    Engr Ivan Bruce

    And here is the second one:

    from: Dr Russell Park drrussellp@gmail.com
    to:
    bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
    date: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 3:53 AM
    subject: SERVICE NEEDED !!!

    Hello,

    I’m Dr Russell,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 27th-30th of August to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.

    You can mail me directly on
    Rpark@dr.com
    Await your reply.

    Dr Russell Park

    Notice how impossibly similar they are? Note the subject line in ALL CAPS with three exclamation marks — not signs of professionalism. Note also the grammatical errors like the comma splices, the absence of spaces after commas and before open parentheses, the lack of  hyphen and the ungrammatical s in “4days conference,” the lack of period after the abbreviation for hour (“hr”) and the lowercase i. Your English teacher was right; grammatical errors reduce your credibility, and so they should. Finally, note how they each ask you to reply to email addresses other than the address the emails were supposedly sent from. I don’t know what their scam is, but there’s obviously something afoot.

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  • Sample of my interpreting & transliterating

    Looking back a year later, I feel even more strongly about the benefits of using work samples for assessment. My idea in sharing this was that interpreters and students of interpreting could assess my work for their own benefit. Someone I knew accused me of narcissism and mocked me for “bestowing my work upon the world for their edification,” but that’s exactly what it’s for. Our professor in our current Assessment for Interpreter Educators course suggested several interpreting samples for us to watch on YouTube and assess using a freewrite. One of the beauties of the process is that you can say exactly what you think and feel without hurting the feelings of the person whose work you’re assessing, because you’re not even talking to the person; you’re just writing to yourself. (Ultimately the goal is to use non-evaluative language to reflect what you saw in the work, but the freewrite is an uncensored expression of your observations.) This was the kind of thing I had in mind when I shared this sample of my interpreting & transliterating. I don’t want feedback on this sample for myself, but I kind of love the idea of your assessing it on your own or in a classroom or study group. Maybe I’m not a narcissist but rather an exhibitionist; no matter. Love it, hate it, like it, dislike it, agree with it, disagree with it, learn/teach what to do and what not to do… talk to yourself or talk amongst yourselves.

    Daniel Greene's avatarDaniel Greene

    As an assignment for the Master of Arts in Interpreting Studies at Western Oregon University (WOU MAIS), I completed a videotaping of myself spending about 20 minutes interpreting a source text I had not heard before: Simon Lewis’s talk “Don’t take consciousness for granted,” at TED.com. There is an interactive transcript that you can view by following the link.

    I would like to think this is not a sample of my best work, but I am humble enough to accept that there are times when this is the best I can do with such an unfamiliar topic and fast pace.

    Here are some facts about me and the circumstances under which this sample was recorded:

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