How do interpreters work with Japanese and Romance languages?

I’m really curious because the order of the words in the phrases in these languages are usually inversed

4 comments
  1. What do you mean? Its extremely difficult and requires extra schooling and fluency in both languges

  2. The most important thing in interpreting is getting the idea across. If I say “feles mei amo” (Latin, cat me/I love”) and want to translate it to English, I’ll change the words around to say “I love my cat” despite the fact that it’s not the right order, and “my” isn’t a word originally said. Same with Japanese, forgive me I’m still learning, but I believe I’d translate that same Latin to “私の猫を愛します” because it gets across the idea that I love my cat. Maybe change it from love to like since there’s some different cultural meaning between love and like. Interpreting between languages is all about getting across the same idea, despite a different word choice and sometimes different culture.

  3. I’ve interpreted from English to Spanish and vice versa, and I don’t actually translate on time; I lag behind because of things like garden path sentences and long structures that have easier translations. It’s not hard to imagine Japanese translators do the same, though they probably struggle more than I do.

    Working memory is the name of the game. There are training exercises, and you’d be surprised how far you can get.

  4. With great difficulty.

    In all seriousness, it’s the same as interpreting between any pair of languages with different word order. Its more demanding in terms of simultaneous memorising a sentence while translating the previous one, but it is doable with fluency and practice.

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