Other people’s words about … language and interpreting

This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. This was happening to me now, in the conference room. I was absorbed by the task at hand, of decoding the legalese in which the content of the discussion was encased, so securely that nothing seemed to penetrate and nothing escaped. And yet — as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand — something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, ‘cross-border raid’, ‘mass grave’, ‘armed youth’.

I reached for the glass of water. One of the junior associates was speaking now — a solid wall of language that barrelled towards me as I drank all the water in the glass, poured another, and then drank that. I set the glass down, I had lost my place, I looked at the notepad again, as if I would find a clue there. The associate came to an abrupt stop, the former president [for whom I was interpreting] turned to look at me. Is everything okay, the associate asked sharply. I just need a moment, I said. Could we go back — the associate answered impatiently, Yes, yes, of course. How far? He exchanged glances with [the defence barrister] Kees, who was watching me, one arm folded over the other. He had been silent the entire time, now he suddenly spoke. Let’s take a break. Five minutes? And the others immediately rose to their feet as if they too had only been waiting for an excuse to pause.

From ‘Intimacies‘
By Katie Kitamura

When I was a young woman I studied French, German and Mandarin at university. I had a facility for language, for words, and in those days I thought that I might one day become an interpreter in one of these languages, like the narrator in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies. I studied all three languages for a year, having also studied French and German at high school, and then at the end of the year, which was the end of my first year at university, having achieved distinctions in all three subjects, I left university, left Australia, and didn’t return home to resume my studies for another three years.

By then I’d decided not to pursue a career in languages at all. I had understood from my travels that my natural shyness and introversion would make the kinds of context in which an interpreter works difficult for me, and I had decided not to challenge myself in that way. Funnily enough, this realisation came to me while I was living in Germany, where I had gone to live for a year to become fluent in German. Funnily enough, I should add, by the time I came to the realisation that interpreting wasn’t for me, I was almost entirely fluent in German. Anyway, I came back to Australia and left all of this behind, my fluency in German, my plans to be an interpreter, all of that.

Footprints in the sand, March 2025.

It’s funny, though, because Katie Kitamura’s description in the passage I’ve quoted above of the experience of being so immersed in the pursuit of choosing the correct word that you lose all sense of meaning is something I am deeply familiar with in another context — editing. As an editor, I have edited books in the fields of geology, medicine, history, literature and religion. On hearing this, people frequently say to me, ‘Wow, you must have learned a lot about geology/medicine/history/literature/religion!’ But the truth is, I don’t absorb that kind of information when I’m editing. Like Kitamura’s interpreter, I decode the language I’m working with in the material I’m editing — meaning that I make sure that the sentences are grammatically correct, that there are no spelling errors, that the writer has presented their argument cogently — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I understand it.

You literally do not know what you are saying, says Kitamura’s narrator of interpreting. Likewise, I would say of editing, I literally do not know what I am reading.

There are times when I regret losing the languages I learned when I was younger. There are times when I wish I had tried a little harder, thought a little more laterally, about how a person like me might use her language skills in her career without needing to be a gifted conversationalist or gregarious extrovert. But perhaps in the end my love for words and decoding language are what led me to become an editor, even if only by default. And I am, despite everything, grateful to have found my way to an editing life. It has served me well.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• So autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented: I’ve been reading up on autofiction recently, though I’m not a fan of some of the most famous autoficton novels by Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti. Here, Christina Lorentzen explores what autofiction is in all its guises.
• The inspiration for this book arrived after a long creative drought, during which I came to accept that I would never write another novel: Melanie Cheng, on writing her Stella Prize-longlisted novel, The Burrow. As someone who has experienced many a long creative drought, I find Cheng’s comments, along with the comments of all the other novelists long listed for the Stella this year, fascinating.
• Cyra is a young queer woman whose sobriety is not the driving force of the novel. Her recovery is a part of her story, but it doesn’t define her. (For a long time, I thought my sobriety had to be my entire identity. I didn’t know how to make room for the rest of me): I’ve read many books, both memoirs and works of fiction, about alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and I’ve always been troubled by the way they seem to present only one path to sobriety, which is abstinence and AA. But here, I’m glad to report, is Saratoga Schaefer on why their first novel depicts a different path to sobriety.
• You would be surprised to hear that even the Mediterranean diet riles me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato juices, olive oil, vinegar, bits of onion – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Crete: Yotam Ottolenghi on why intermittent fasting messed with his brain instead of helping him to lose weight, why eating isn’t only about nutrition and why the solution to losing weight isn’t dieting.
• How AI is stealing our writing: Yes, my writing, too, has been stolen by Meta’s AI tool, and while I’m shocked and devastated, I’m sad to say that I’m also not remotely surprised that this is where AI is taking us …