Tips for Journalists on Working With Interpreters

There are so many pitfalls to reporting in translation.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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When I reported at Zaatari, seen here, I worked with an interpreter who made my work harder than it had to be.

I turned to a young woman overheating in a hijab and long, black polyester dress and asked her to tell me what it was like to live at Zaatari, in Jordan, one of the world’s largest refugee camps. I asked whether she had encountered any problems with men in the camp, something I’d been hearing was an issue.

“Yes, with her neighbor,” my interpreter said.

I kept my eyes on the woman and asked what was going on.

“He bothers her,” my interpreter said.

In English, I asked the woman to tell me more. What specifically was he doing and when? What had he said to her? How was he making her uncomfortable?

I cringed as, yet again, my translator spoke very few words in Arabic to the woman, clearly not fully translating my questions. And again, the interpreter turned to me after the woman spoke and answered in the third person — “She said he comes to her tent at night” — in sentences that were clearly shortened from what we’d both heard.

This was a mess.

Her use of the third person furthered my detachment from the stories I was pursuing, which only made my work, which was full of challenges in the first place, that much harder.

Reporting in a language you don’t speak is uniquely difficult, and something I’d wrestled with over the years, but this interpreter was really failing me.

There are so many pitfalls to working with interpreters, some of which you can imagine from what happened in Zaatari. The interpreter I’d employed was someone who’d filled in at the last minute for the woman I was supposed to work with, and she was, to be blunt, terrible. Not only was she unable to offer a translation of the actual words my interviewees were saying, but she was profoundly unhappy to be in the squalid camp — she refused to use the bathrooms during the eight hours we worked in there because of the poor conditions.

Each country, language and culture requires unique kinds of interviewing to gather facts and people’s lived experiences. Having a strong translator in foreign territory is critical. I’ve encountered interpreters who make my job extremely hard, like the one in Zaatari, and I’ve worked with brilliant ones who have clearly conveyed the emotion and words spoken by a source. In Ukraine, my interpreter was able to translate the pain of a mother whose children had been shot and killed by Russian soldiers because he listened carefully and repeated her exact words in English.

There are ways to prepare to work with interpreters to make for a better reporting experience, and reasons to vigilantly do so. As this article in Poynter says, the two biggest pitfalls when working with translators are accuracy and tone. To demonstrate the nightmare you can encounter with a failure of tone, the piece quotes the excellent New York Times reporter Barry Bearak, who once covered the aftermath of a hurricane in the Dominican Republic for the Miami Herald:

“I went to some village and just about everything had been washed away. I interviewed some man who had lost everything, and tears were coming out of his eyes and he was moving his hands to and fro, and the interpreter said something like, ‘I estimate the damage to my dwelling to be substantial.’” Bearak asked his photographer, who happened to speak Spanish, to interpret from that point on.

One of the biggest challenges to working in translation is gathering color. Yes, you can look around and describe what you see, you can describe what you smell and the temperature, etc., but without precise translating, you lose the ability to use a source’s particular speech patterns, mutterings and even jokes made offhand.

Poynter offers these tips:

1. Hire someone who speaks conversational English. “If your translator has only an academic background in English, their vocabulary will be substantially different from someone who has lived in America and watched a lot of American TV,” Bearak told Poynter.

2. “Get a translator who will help you navigate cultural differences, or, if you’re in a politically unstable region, won’t put you in danger.” And, I would add, someone who is cognizant of the safety of your source (and doesn’t make decisions of what to say to them without consulting with you.)

3. “Make sure the interpreter understands the importance of accuracy. If your interpreter doesn’t have experience with journalism, explain that accuracy has to do both with both the big picture and nitpicky details. Emphasize how important it is to get the words exactly right and, if the topic is complex, to understand it completely.”

4. “Ask your translator to ‘get in character.’” Meaning, have them speak in first person when they translate. You’re more likely to get the exact words the person spoke that way.

5. “Ask your translator to translate everything he or she hears, no matter how offhand the remark. As Bearak wrote in a 2003 memo on working with a translator circulated internally at The Times: ‘Explain to them that a seemingly irrelevant remark like, “Praise Allah for this new window,” helps you capture the flavor of a scene.’”

It also helps to speak directly to your source when doing an interview. Adding in an interpreter is already a barrier to connecting, so eye contact helps. And ask your interpreter to repeat questions and answers if you hear something surprising, Bearak said in his 2003 memo. If your source speaks a little English, check for yourself what they said and meant. Also, a good translator will tell you if something your source said sounds off — perhaps they’ve said something untrue to cover for something they’re afraid to say.

Poynter also recommends recording interviews so you can go back to a piece of conversation and have it reinterpreted later if necessary for accuracy. Personally, I’ve done this many times when I wonder how precise the in-the-moment translation may have been. If it’s given in stilted English by the interpreter, it’s worth a new translation, is my rule.

In the end, it’s not just about the skill of your interpreter, it’s about the relationship you build with them, just like reporting is about the relationships you build with your sources. Communicating clearly how you like to work before setting out can save you headaches later.

The extra layer of translation is inevitable in some kinds of journalism. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently more problematic. Doing journalism is a kind of translation in itself, I’ve always thought, one that requires all sorts of nuance and adjustments to convey circumstances. We journalists are here to witness the world and tell you what we’ve seen. Good journalism can put you where we were and with the people we were with. Working with an interpreter may add an extra layer to our process, but that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively peel it back to convey authentically the experiences of the people we talk to.

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