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The silence of words
WORDS. They express our thoughts and feelings,
connect us to the people around us, enable us to inherit knowledge
and wisdom from the past, and give flesh to our hopes. We
interpret the world or give meaning to the events around us
through words.
Imagine a world where words fail. Our thoughts
and feelings remain suppressed in our innermost beings. We
are disconnected from others. Unable to digest and absorb
past wisdom, we cannot picture what tomorrow holds for us
as well. We remain clueless as to what the events that happen
before our eyes mean.
In Japan, it is the world in which many of
us live, literally.
As a translator and interpreter, my daily
routine consists of the mundane job of poring over official
documents, mostly smudged by age, making sure I get the kanji
reading and dates right. From time to time, I get a break
with highly challenging manuscripts, like research papers
and even poetry. But by far, what stretches my ability to
the utmost are those that require me to put words into silence,
to express the unspoken, the stutter, the unfinished or suspended
lines. For an interpreter who takes his job seriously, these
are “gray” areas which require him to make a quick
judgment. While verbal accuracy and objectivity are his goals,
sometimes these require reflecting the meaning behind non-verbal
cues. Especially in husband-and-wife cases, I often find myself
not simply conveying messages in words but also rebuilding
a sense of connection between people who have almost come
to accept mutual incomprehension as their fate.
Recently, I was requested by a Filipina mother
to interpret for her and her Japanese husband in their talk
with hospital doctors regarding the condition of their two-year
old baby who continues to breathe only through mechanically
administered oxygen. The mother has long suspected that the
doctors mishandled the baby, who was born with Down syndrome.
But because she could barely communicate with her husband,
much less with the Japanese doctors, she kept what she felt
to herself for two years, bearing her agony in silence.
Requested on short notice, I made a quick
interview of the mother regarding the medical condition of
her baby so that I could brush up on my medical vocabulary.
Just to be doubly sure, however, I also brought a small dictionary
with me. At that time, the mother soberly explained the situation
to me. Later, in our audience with the doctor presently attending
to the baby, I found myself groping less for medical terms
than for words to express the emotions of the mother. With
the doctor, I could always honestly ask for the English equivalent
of medical terms. But I was totally caught off guard by how
the mother suddenly released two years of pent-up emotions.
As if finding herself being understood for the first time,
words streamed forth together with her tears.
The husband also spoke up, to the utter surprise
of the Filipina. “I thought I was carrying this feeling
all alone until now.” The wife confided to me that what
aggravated her burden was that she had thought her husband
did not care about what happened to the baby or how it happened.
In a translation job, I can count the words
exactly, and sometimes calculate my fee on that basis. In
translating musical lyrics, especially, I have to count even
the syllables to fit the melody.
In interpreting, however, the words and their
cadence ebb and flow, depending on who speaks, his emotion
at the time, the interaction of the parties involved, including
perhaps the interpreter.
The doctor, expectedly, spoke in clinically
terse fashion, proceeding from one point to another in logic
measurably devoid of emotion. The other party could take that
as being “insensitive” or even “evasive.”
As interpreter, I found myself obliged to convey the meaning
of those emotionally detached words in their original tone,
even as the doctor periodically prefixed his statements with
“I truly understand your feeling.” At the same time,
however, I was even more obliged to convey the mind of the
speaker behind those words, lest he be judged inappropriately.
From carefully cadenced language, I had to
switch back to the free-flowing tone and emotion of the other
party, the mother. In this particular case, the mother spoke
with the instinct of one who knew that something was wrong
with the baby that escaped the attention of the doctors, with
all their state-of-the-art medical tests. She insisted that
the doctors glossed over symptoms that glaringly pointed to
a more serious ailment and consequently led them to the decision
that the baby could be safely discharged from the hospital.
A few days later, the baby choked on sputum in his trachea
and is now in a comatose state.
The ideal interpreter is simply a human instrument
to convert meanings into mutually understandable words. Gifted
with the ability to understand and speak mutually exclusive
languages, the interpreter is just a medium for words. But
to do his job, he often has to get into the worlds, minds,
and hearts of the people he speaks for. Oftentimes, what a
person says cannot be understood separately from what he experiences
in his world. As interpreter, I rate my job well not only
when I find the right words for any given expression but also
when I understand the silence of the speaker.*
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