THE INTERPRETER’S TALENT AND SCHOOLING (SOME OBSERVATIONS OF A MILITARY TRANSLATOR)

Abstract

Background. An interpreter shares his impressions and experience of helping to train Ukrainian soldiers in British military camps.

Results. The author considers the factors that facilitate military interpretation and those that complicate it. In particular, he names among the former the specific objectivity, or subject concreteness of training, the systematic nature of terminology, and the integrity of terminology systems, and he mentions among the latter dialect (non-standard) pronunciation and territorial variation of the English language. Postulating the idea that even a lightning-fast translation remains a comprehension of the original, the article touches upon the problem of the speed of oral re-expression, and regards the correlation in the translation process between the skill of automatic substitution and the need for analysis and explanation of the speaker's statements by the go-between, who is enabled to control the degree of understanding of the parties by clarifying the meaning of what the speaker has said and by finding out whether the listeners understand the translation version and in what way.

Discussion and conclusions. The author provides examples of the replenishment of Ukrainian military terminology with anglicisms, including abbreviations, assessing and summarizing the tendencies of neologization of the professional lexicon through borrowings. He draws attention to the need to harmonize the pronunciation (and hence the spelling) of a term in translation and discusses the terms, not infrequent, that combine logical components of meaning with figurative and emotional ones. He emphasizes the importance of a professional level of pronunciation, diction, voice and hearing for an interpreter. These qualities of the trade, in view of the researcher, are unfairly underestimated in university programs and time-tables. The fact that many of the best military interpreters are unqualified but motivated civilian self-taught individuals leads the author to believe that the talent of an interpreter is formed and manifested in early childhood along with other basic language skills, including the ability to re-express oneself within the mother tongue, the richness of which is recognized to be a measure of intelligence.

Keywords: military interpreting, training of soldiers, terminology, language varieties, hearing, voice.