Telephone interpreting
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of January 9, 2003.
RealWorld Systems is currently engaged in a review of immigrant service programs
funded by the federal and provincial governments in Ontario. One of the essential
service components for many newcomers to Canada is interpretation - many speak
languages other than English or French. We've been looking at interpreting
services for our own needs (for interviewing newcomers) at the same time that
I've been researching new phone systems for my office. It occurs to me that
the new phones on the market provide some interesting options for telephone
interpreting.
I worked with interpreters for many years, providing psychological assessments
and psychotherapy to deaf adults with the help of sign language interpreters.
More recently, I've been helping the Canadian Hearing Society and the Deaf-Hearing
Communication Centre (in Pennsylvania) to set up video interpreting services
in American Sign Language. Video interpreting is targeted at deaf clients
who need access to a variety of services, especially health, in remote areas
where sign language interpreters are scarce and travel times are long. When
a deaf person comes into the emergency department in Thunder Bay, it might
take 3 or 4 hours before a sign language interpreter can travel to the hospital.
Using video, sign language interpreters can be 'on call' at a studio in Sudbury
and interpret for a hearing doctor and a deaf patient in North Bay. (By the
way, the Canadian Hearing Society is beginning to rent its videoconferencing
facilities to other organizations for meetings and conferences at reduced
rates. Contact Northwind Communications
for more information. They offer high quality video over internet because
sign language requires over 25 frames per second for full comprehension.)
In comparison, interpreting for spoken languages is relatively simple. You
don't need a video link to have a 3-way conversation between a service provider,
a client, and an interpreter. There are definitely disadvantages to using
phones rather than face to face interpreting - the interpreter misses the
facial expressions and the client may be confused by the experience of talking
into a phone that translates what his/her service provider is saying - but
there are advantages too:
- If you have unexpected drop-ins by people who cannot speak a language offered by your agency, phone interpreting is a quick way of assessing the urgency of the situation and possibly delivering service right away. In some cases you can set up an appointment with someone in the agency who can speak the client's language, or book an interpreter for a face-to-face session. But you may need to speak to the client for a few minutes to explain this.
- If the client is in a fairly small ethnic or linguistic community, he/she
may already know most of the freelance interpreters in the community. This
can be embarrassing - for example, the interpreter may end up knowing a
great deal about the client's medical, legal and family problems through
multiple contacts in various situations. Many clients prefer anonymity,
which may be easier to obtain through a large national service of phone
interpreters.
Two major telephone interpreting services in the U.S. are LanguageLine
and TeleInterpreters. Both of
them claim to provide services 24 hours a day, within about 30 seconds of your
call, in about 150 languages. They can even assess what language the client
is speaking if you don't know, and forward you to the appropriate interpreter.
They cost a lot - from $3 to $5 per minute CDN - but typically they would
help with short calls. For example, a patient in emergency might be at the hospital
for several hours but needs only about 30 minutes of interpreting, in 5-10 minute
batches throughout that time. Bringing in a local face to face interpreter might
be even more expensive - if you could find one at 2am.
These phone interpreting services support 911 calls across North America, and
are used to working under intense pressure. It's an interesting model. It's
clearly more cost effective to hire staff who can speak the language of the
communities you serve, or to develop a relationship with a good local interpreting
service (see the Language MarketPlace
or Multilingual Community Interpreting
Services in Toronto) but for quick response you can't beat the phone.
Well, all that is old hat - but there's some neat stuff happening with phone
systems that may make phone interpreting even easier. While I was researching
possible interpreting services to work with, I was also struggling with the
phone system in my home office. My house has two offices, six computers, three
land lines, three mobile phones, high speed internet access, and two fax services.
It's similar to a small agency, in that we're on the phone most of the time
and when we're not, we may be wandering around the building doing the photocopying
or talking about projects. Voicemail tag can go on for days if we're not easily
accessible on the phone.
There's a fairly new type of phone system called 'multi-line, multi-handset
wireless' (for specific information on phones, see HelloDirect).
Panasonic and Vtech are the leaders right now, but new products are coming on
the market quickly, so I'll use the new Vtech just as an example of features.
The Vtech UT40-2421 is a completely cordless 4-line phone system that can handle up
to 12 handsets. The handsets look like mobile phones, and can use a headphone
with microphone, so you can hook it on your belt and look as though you're talking
to yourself. It looks silly, but it's really comfortable. The handsets can talk
to each other without using an external line, acting like an intercom system.
That means that, for example, three people could be on separate outside phone
calls, and a fourth person could be having a teleconference with six internal
staff members plus an external person. No-one would have a fixed corded phone.
Staff people could work anywhere in the building, carrying their cordless phones
with them. (Panasonic has a 4-line model that offers individual voice mail boxes
for each user, but is far more limited
on the use of the handsets for internal calls.)
This approach to phone systems could be really useful for small agencies. (For agency staff who frequently travel and who want to forward calls to their mobile phones, the Centrepoint system looks fascinating too; that's basically a cheap PBX with some very cool features, including internal intercom.)
But back to interpreting. If a client needed phone interpreting, the service provider would hand him/her a cordless phone with a headset to plug into his/her ear. The service provider would then call the interpreting service, and bring the client into the conversation in a 3-way call. The client and provider would be talking directly to each other, in any part of the building, with the voice of the interpreter going directly into their headsets. They could walk into different offices carrying these phones, or switch service providers by transferring the call to another staff member's headset. At the end of the visit, the client would give the phone back. This would save on phone costs and make interpreting almost transparent. It's worth trying...
If anyone has used phone interpreting like this, please let me know how it works.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
