a blog by Peter Leonard
While in Tokyo I gave a brief overview of some of the quantitative techniques we’re using to read hundreds of thousands of books as part of the Google Books Digital Humanities Project. The context for this talk was a meeting of Japanese librarians and book publishers, and the language of the conference was of course Japanese.
Translation for the English-language speakers was handled through two excellent simultaneous interpreters, who traded off duties every 10 minutes or so. In this photo, they are the two women sitting in front of the whiteboard at the front of the room:
I would speak a few sentences, and then pause while my claims were broadcast over the speaker system in Japanese. This led to an interesting ‘chunking’ phenomenon: I learned to slice your thoughts into independent blocks, each with a beginning, middle, and end. I’d estimate that I spoke in short paragraphs, if I were to have what I said transcribed. It was rare, I found, that I tried to extend a talking point over several ‘chunks’ of translation, or that you went on an extended tangent — I specifically found myself not telling shaggy-dog stories I could have.
This is not to say that the experience was dumbed-down in any way — in fact, I think being forced to split a talk into a sequence of ‘tweets’ actually helped organize and sort the data I had to present. In addition, hearing the translation being broadcast to the room gave me a bit of time to think through what you’ve just said, and what you want to say next. (My impression was that the Japanese version took longer to say, either because of differences between the two languages or because the translators were very careful and precise.) The pause between each chunk of speech gave me a sort of mandatory reflective period, during which I could think through where the talk was going and how the audience seemed to be reacting.
Questions at the end of talks were nearly the same set-up, except that we wore headphones through which we heard the questions being translated, rather than having the English broadcast to the entire room. There was a really good conversation about eBooks, eBook Readers and Japanese/American reading habits — among undergraduates in libraries as well as customers in bookstores. (Kinokuniya, a large Japanese publisher and bookseller, was the sponsor of the roundtable.)