World's best Chinese-English interpreter's fascinating story
If you’re interested in simultaneous translation, Mandarin, or fascinating biographies, you’ll love this article about a “fair-skinned, balding, bespectacled and slightly paunchy” 40-year-old Canadian “widely considered the top Chinese-English language interpreter working in China”:
[Dawrant] spent much of his university years at a dim-sum restaurant. He first had to push the cart of a “dim-sum girl” around the sprawling restaurant hawking siu mai and har gao dumplings. He soon graduated to busboy and eventually to a full-fledged waiter. He became a minor celebrity in Edmonton’s Chinese community for his ability to converse in Cantonese with customers.
“My entire social life in university was based around the dim-sum restaurant,” he says….
Jean Duval was Canada’s top Chinese-language interpreter in the 1980s and 1990s. A large man with a handlebar mustache and a booming voice, he was born in France but was employed by the government of Canada. Some say this intellectual and gregarious character did as much to strengthen Canada’s ties with China as any diplomat – when he visited the country with Jean Chrétien, he would receive just as warm a personal welcome from Chinese president Jiang Zemin as the prime minister did.
Mr. Dawrant met Mr. Duval on a plane headed to China in 1989. The interpreter was reading a book in a language Mr. Dawrant couldn’t recognize (it was Uighur – Mr. Duval was compiling a dictionary). They spoke Mandarin to each other and Mr. Dawrant then switched to Cantonese. Mr. Duval couldn’t converse as well in that language so he retaliated with Shanghainese. They called it a draw, and Mr. Duval talked about his career as an interpreter.
“It was absolutely fascinating to me. It was something I had never really thought about before. I’d been learning Chinese very seriously, but with no end game,” Mr. Dawrant says.
The next stop was a brutal interpreting school in Taiwan where, like a U.S. Marine, Dawrant was physically and mentally dismantled to be built back up as an interpreter.
“It was class, practice and then more class and more practice. We never went anywhere. It was like special forces training for two years,” he says. “They completely reconfigured the way your brain works – the way you deal with language and memory. Constructing a discourse model. Getting inside the speakers head and becoming very flexible with all your languages. It is kind of like torture, basically.”
Posted by James on Tuesday, August 30, 2011