Untrained bilinguals

Apart from being seen as machines, it seems that the media sees any individual who speaks fluently in two languages as being qualified to be an interpreter. Taiwan’s media may even perpetuate the use of untrained interpreters by applauding their interpreting performance. Take Lesley Ma, the daughter of Ma Ying-Jeou, the former president of the Republic of China. Lesley Ma interpreted consecutively for artist Cai Guo-Qiang in a press conference in 2008 because she worked for Cai and speaks fluent Chinese and English. The news media applauded her stage presence and performance, neglecting or tolerating her lack of formal training in interpreting.

Vincent Chao is another typical example. As the Deputy Director of the Department of International Affairs of the DPP, Chao was assigned to serve as the interpreter in the Tsai Ing-Wen’s international press conference. Without formal interpreter training, Chao made mistakes and stammered in the Q&A session; however, he was not grilled over his lack of qualifications. Instead, his mistakes were justifiable in the news’

media’s eyes merely because he had never received training. This argument presented by the news media may strengthen the belief that training is not necessary for

conference interpreters, for it suggests that untrained interpreters can still perform the task well, and that the public would be more tolerant of their mistakes than those of trained conference interpreters.

2.2.2.3 “Big events, big money and big mistakes”

Regardless of being trained or not, interpreters at large receive little attention from the news media. Only when“big events, big money and big mistakes”are

involved does the media discuss interpreting (Diriker, 2004, p. 40). In “big events”

like international summits and UN conferences, simultaneous interpreting would catch outsiders’ eyes. The Turkish news media once invited its audience to imagine words being “interpreted into eight languages all at the same time” during an international event (Diriker, 2004, p.40).

A similar pattern can be observed in Taiwan’s news. News media in Taiwan does not normally cover interpreting as a profession with the exception of big events. For example, as mentioned earlier, the interpretation at the Tsai-Ing-Wen’s 2016

international press conference stimulated discussions about whether the use of an untrained interpreter was justifiable. This big event gave high exposure to the interpreter Vincent Chao. Another example is Zhang Lu, who is a Chinese diplomat

who interprets for senior Chinese officials in high-level events such as Lianghui, “the annual plenary sessions of the national or local People's Congress” in mainland China (Lianghui, 2017). Having been working as the interpreter for Mainland China’s premiers for years, Zhang Lu has received much attention from news media both in Mainland China and Taiwan, and the public has been amazed by her extraordinary stage presence and excellent consecutive interpretations of Chinese poems. Taiwan’s broadcast of the US presidential debate in 2016 is yet another example of a big event that drew the news media’s attention to interpreting. The US presidential debates were broadcasted by Taiwan’s news channels in real time with simultaneous interpreting service. Thanks to the massive viewership of the presidential debates, simultaneous interpreting was also brought into the center of attention and subsequently triggered discussions pertaining to interpreting.

In regards to “big money,” Diriker (2004) refers to the public media’s belief that simultaneous interpreters earn high salaries or hourly pay. When Taiwan’s news media interviewed interpreters, the allegedly high wages are also usually much emphasized as in Professional Interpreters got highly paid for speaking (口譯專家說 出一口高薪) (The Economic Daily News, Sep. 2007, pp.118-120) and All Walks of

Life – Interpreter ([360 行有錢賺]-口譯員) (USTV, 2016), to name a few.

Conference interpreters’ high wages are usually one of the selling points of these

interviews, even though the news media do recognize that interpreting is extremely stressful and requires special expertise.

“Big mistakes,” unfortunately, also get interpreters excessive media exposure. As Diriker (2009) described, in 1998, Helmut Kohl, the then Chancellor of Germany,

visited Turkey. An interpreter was blamed for erroneously interpreting the words of Mesut Yılmaz, then Prime Minister of Turkey, in a conference attended by both the

Turkish and German press. The simultaneous interpreter was accused of interpreting

“Old friends cannot become enemies” into “Our old friend Kohl is our new enemy,”

and thus strongly criticized as “unacceptably tactless” and heightening tensions between Turkey and Germany (Diriker, 2004, p.42). Taiwan’s news media seldom miss their chance to report on interpreters’ mistakes. For example, Ai Fukuhara, a Japanese table tennis player, was interviewed by a British journalist in Korea in 2010.

An untrained Chinese-English interpreter was asked to mediate the communication on the spot. His interpretation ended up inaccurate and incomplete. The interview was later uploaded to YouTube, reported by Taiwan’s news media, and has accumulated more than 1.3 million views. Obviously, “big mistakes” truly get interpreters high exposure, but this type of exposure might be useless, if not detrimental, to the

professionalization of interpreting. Judging from the occasions in which outsiders pay attention to interpreters, it might be safe to suggest that interpreters are closely

associated with“big events, big money and big mistakes” (Diriker, 2004, p.40).

To sum up, insiders to the T&I community have the ideal professional image of conference interpreters in their own minds, while outsiders form their perceptions or misperceptions of interpreters with or without considering the insider’s perspective. In this light, the purpose of reviewing insiders’ representations and outsiders’ perceptions is to help the researcher capture what the ideal professional image of conference interpreters could be and, in turn, contribute to shaping outsiders’ perceptions of conference interpreting as a profession.

Chapter Three: Methods

Content analysis was performed to explore the professional image of

Chinese-English conference interpreters in Taiwan. The data consist of eight general representations of conference interpreters in Taiwan and 47 commentaries on Vincent Chao’s interpretation from electronic news media.