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Translators & Interpreters on Television

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A December 27th Business Insider article took a look at how the average American spends much of his free time watching television. All told, the average person spends 4 hours a day in front of the boob tube, which amounts to 28 hours a week. That much time doing any one thing is bound to affect what you think about the world. That’s over a full day’s worth of information and impressions piped into your brain, influencing your thought.

As Sir Phillip Sidney argued in “Defense of Poesy,” life reflects art, but art also reflects life. So when we think about how translators and interpreters are portrayed on American television, we not only see what the public thinks about us, but what they’re probably going to continue to think about us. For Sidney, the equivalent was poetry’s impression on something as simple as, say, a bundle of grapes. Some bit of beauty in the way the light hits a cluster might led someone to write a poem. So art reflects life. But after reading the poem, the grapes look even more beautiful to the reader. And so life reflects art. It’s a cycle—how what we take in changes our thoughts and how our thoughts, once turned into art, change what other people take in. But before I go full-on English major, what I’m trying to say is this: How translators and interpreters are portrayed on television shows what Americans think of our profession.

So what do they think then?

Fourteen year-olds make great medical interpreters.

Meet Charlie, the 14 year-old who interprets Spanish at a Central American medical clinic in ABC’s “Off the Map.” Airing 2011 for one season, the show follows a group of remarkably horny doctors who treat patients in developing-world situations when they’re not having sex in the jungle. (Well, maybe Charlie’s role wasn’t the only problem with this show.) But what’s pertinent to note here is that on these medical missions, they’re accompanied by their 14 year old sidekick who has no problem interpreting phrases like “clinical manifestations of ruptured appendicitis,” “acute and chronic hepatitis delta over time,” and “We’re going to put coconut in his veins?!?” (Hey, no one said this was Emmy material.)

The idea of a 14 year old who’s mature enough and skilled enough to serve as sole interpreter for a limited-resource medical crisis unit is absurd. But considering many hospitals across the United States still insist on using children as interpreters today, can you blame them?

The best interpreters are your mom and sister.

Moving on to another ABC triumph, the currently-airing “Switched at Birth” is a story about two teenagers who were—you guessed it—switched at birth.  The important factor here is that one of the teens is deaf.  And last season, she got arrested. When the cops come to get her, her mother, played by Lea Thompson, dramatically signs, “They’re here to arrest you.” Because of course the police, knowing she was deaf beforehand, couldn’t bring an interpreter to sign that. And they don’t provide one in interrogation, either, which results in the deaf teen’s interpreting sister taking responsibility for the crime and distorting other facts. But hey, law enforcement doesn’t need to make sure arrested suspects understand what’s going on or that they have the person who actually committed the crime, right? Just as with “Off the Map,” police across the United States continue to go without interpreters and rely on family members all the time, so can you really blame ABC?

A professional legal translator, on the other hand, will save your butt.

Season 2 of CBS’s “The Good Wife” finds a case against the Venezuelan government in jeopardy over translation error. Deep in the throes of litigation, the attorneys discover the English version of the contract says one thing while the Spanish version says another. Understanding this mistake will cost their client millions, they bring in a professional interpreter to renegotiate that portion of the contract with opposing counsel before having it retranslated. (Full episode here.)

Interpreters are hilarious.

You can’t talk about translators or interpreters on television without talking about Lucy.

We’ll all be replaced by computers.

And finally, the one “translator” everyone includes when they make lists of this sort, the Universal Translator from “Star Trek.” Machine translation is a whole series of blog entries in its own right, but it’s worth pointing out that even the Universal Translator didn’t translate correctly all the time. Unless “bags of mostly water” really is another way to say “humans”?


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