Your Speech Translator Companion for your Global Communication needs
Contextual Inquiry
Business Meetings - Video Conferencing
Interpreter as active facilitator - In the second meeting, the interpreter on several occasions presented pinpoint questions to a certain side based on what he heard from the other side and his understanding of the topic matter. This proved helpful in moving the discussion along. The first interpreter took a less active stance and simply provided interpretation of the remarks.
Latency - While it is obvious that interpretation would increase the latency of the conversation by about a factor of two, for contentious issues, the efficiency seemed to reduce even further due to the language disconnect. This was particularly the case for the second meeting. However, when asked, the participants understood the inevitability of interpretation adding time to the meeting, and they didn't seem to feel disjointed by the delay, albeit if not tired from an extremely lengthy meeting.
Summary vs. word-for-word - Often times, the interpreter would summarize what was said as opposed to providing a word-for-word translation. Kenny found this to be effective more often than not. While sometimes information was lost in summarizing, he felt that its positives in terms of efficiently communicating the message outweighed its negatives.
Lengthy pauses - given that abstract thoughts were being formulated on the fly about contentious issues, there would often be lengthy pauses between statements or even words of a single statement.
Interpreter feedback - In the second meeting, when the interpreter missed fully understanding a given statement, he would ask, "Could you run that by me again?" (The interpreter in the first meeting did this to a lesser degree and would instead do his best to translate given the provided information.) Also, on one occasion, the second interpreter said he was unsure of what the translation of "fund settlement" would be in Japanese prior to translating it. The NOA members reassured him that the Japan team would understand if he just said the term as an English word.
Terminology - Many terms that would be unknown to outsiders (such as Kenny) were being used frequently. Separate from the two meetings that were observed, an interpreter of legal meetings at NOA expressed to Kenny how important and involved legal terminology is. Often times with such terms, literal translations would simply yield confusion on the other side. A direct mapping of terms (and a good memory if you are a human translator) is thus necessary with such important concepts
Foreign Travelers - Travel Reservations
Text Transcript - it would be really helpful to have the actual text of what was being said to facilitate the understanding and also to see the spelling of words to be able to look them up.
Latency - In general, he did not want to use the translator in the middle of the conversation because that would make the other person wait, but he also mentioned that people are often (but not always) understanding and allow him to take his time seeing that he is struggling
Errors - online translators are not perfect and that longer and more complicated sentences might result in errors.
Protocol for clarification - sometimes protocols flow naturally to ensure correct understanding, and that one option was to answer a question in the form of "You asked me X, and my answer is Y."
