International Association of Facilitators
1999 Annual Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
January 14-17 1999
Thread #6: Professional and Self Development Track
Nancy Hamm Curren
Team Learning
915 Flower Street
Lakewood, CO 80215, USA
303-274-2799
currenn@ibm.net
If you haven’t steered your message across a language barrier yet, you may need to soon. Facilitative training is a hot global market. Trainers that can connect with an adult audience are sought out around the world. But even a masterful communicator will be ineffective if she doesn’t know a few special communication tips for working with a translator. Coming from my admittedly American perspective, I will share common-sense lessons learned from my experiences with groups in America, Europe and Asia. In this paper, the term interpreter should be defined in the broadest context as, "the person making sense of your foreign gibberish." This is not to be confused with a translator who would meticulously decipher each word, usually in written text or by simultaneous broadcast.
It is likely that you will not know your interpreter before you arrive on site. Working with a stranger is a tough act. Make certain that you have a commitment for plenty of time to get acquainted and plan your strategy before you are in front of a group. You and your interpreter need to form a strong partnership. Contracting up front will speed up the process.
Interpreters’ skills and experiences vary greatly. Your interpreter may be highly experienced, or she may simply be the only one around who knows your language. Effective or not, she may have taught herself the art of interpreting. It is also likely that she has little or no experience with facilitation. You will need to quickly assess skills and be prepared to coach your interpreter.
You may form a relationship with your interpreter that is personal as well as professional. In a foreign place where you are totally unfamiliar with the language and culture, the bond you form with your interpreter may be intensely personal. She may be your portal to information, entertainment and even basic survival. It is therefore even more important to politely, but firmly, establish your distinct work roles.
Role clarification is good practice in creating relationships that work smoothly. It is important that you both understand your contributions, quirks and needs. Your role as the content expert must never be shared by the interpreter, who is your ‘voice’. You will need to work hard to maintain your presence while your information seemingly comes from another ‘talking head’. You must contract with your interpreter for the permission to gently interrupt or redirect her if she is in some way interfering with what you, as the professional facilitator-trainer, need to have happen in the room.
Stay in the information flow
.If she is interested in your topic and has done her homework, your interpreter may feel that it is more expedient to simply answer a question for you. Unfortunately, this will undermine your presence as an authority. More importantly, this will subtly take you out of the communication flow. As a facilitator and trainer, you know that early detection of problems is essential to your job. You need to get a sense of where participants have trouble either understanding or accepting the material. You need to know what the questions are, and you need to be the one who answers them! Tell your interpreter, when you are contracting with her, why this is important to you and get her agreement to be reminded in front of the client. Then, do it immediately at the first violation, so that you get a useful routine installed early on. The information flow must be unbroken - from your participants, through her, to you, and back again.
Most of us know that certain groups prefer less social space between speakers. It can be humorous to watch an American being ‘danced’ around a room as he retreats from an advancing European speaker who is trying to connect with his elusive conversation partner. The participants in this odd dance are motivated by paradigms about the meaning of space between speakers that are culturally rooted and outside their awareness. It is important to be sensitive to these cultural nuances in order to get and keep rapport.
You can also reinforce your role in the classroom and influence behavior by attending to psycho-geography, or the impact of physical space on our thinking and behavior. This is one of the paradigms that unobtrusively rule our classroom behavior that should be explored, used to advantage, or adjusted. As experienced facilitators, we are accustomed to using our physical presence in the room to create certain moods or responses. We understand the differences it makes when we stand in the center of a horseshoe of seated participants versus standing to the side or sitting down. We use our movement very deliberately, and if we are masterful, we rarely think about it.
The interpreter, your voice, is a new element in the equation. Remember - she can not read your mind. First, you must make yourself aware of the psycho-geography of the room, then you may need to coach your interpreter. Be sure to contract in advance for the permission to move her to where she will not compete with the mood or communication flow that you are trying to create. It is natural for the speaker to take center stage, but don’t let her step in front of you or block your view of participants’ faces. Remember, you are the messenger and she is the voice. Don’t give away your position at center stage before your message has been heard.
So, you will have contracted for information and space. Don’t forget about time. Interpreting is exhausting work. I have also worked with interpreters for the deaf. These highly trained and skillful interpreters are working on many levels - listening and interpreting with their whole bodies. Ask your interpreter to let you know how often she needs a break. Let her know how to signal you when she needs help. You may need to reinforce to some interpreters that it is okay to ask for what they need. Partnership is a two way street.
If you have the available resources, you may want to have more then one interpreter on a long job. As much time you think you will need - you will probably need more! A training program delivered in a shared language that takes two days, will easily take three or even four days when working through a language barrier.
Think about those Japanese horror movies. (I grew up on them.) Foreign movies of the 50's and 60's were translated with voice overs. I remember how the actors’ mouths moved but the words came a little later. Often the poor translations didn’t accurately match what we saw on the screen. While we generally got the point, the communication medium was not entirely satisfying. Communicating via a translator can be a bit like those old movies. Our goal must be to enhance the synchronization and minimize misinterpretation.
We communicate meaning on several levels, the content level, or the words in the message, as well as the process level, which takes in the context, and other sensory clues. What we say is less than half the equation; how we communicate the message often carries significantly more weight. As skillful communicators, we must manage the visual, auditory and digital (words) cues to put our message across congruently.
To succeed, we have to behave in ways that are not natural to normal conversation. You would agree that it is natural in most cultures to look at a speaker. As I said above, we ‘listen’ for visual process clues as much as to spoken content. So, it is our natural tendency to say our piece, then hand it off to our interpreter to make sense of it for our audience. We naturally ‘hand it off’ with the nonverbal clue of looking toward her. Then, we tend to watch along with our audience as she speaks. It is very hard to digress from this normal pattern of human communication. We naturally look at the speaker. But you must remember that you are the speaker; the interpreter is only conveying your message. It is enough that you must give her the content part of your communication; don’t also relinquish the entire process of communicating meaning when you don’t have to.
Think of what you are missing when you watch your interpreter. You are missing the opportunity to reinforce that meaning with your own congruent body language, and, most importantly, you are missing the nonverbal clues from your audience that we unconsciously rely upon to tell how we are doing. Boris may have been smiling broadly and nodding at you while you were speaking in your native language (foreign to him) but he could be frowning and shaking his head when he hears the message in his language. You want to know this!
If you watch people in conversation as I often do, you will begin to see some nonverbal patterns. When we are listening to speech that we don’t understand, or can’t predict, such as a foreign language or quantum physics (for me!), our body postures tend to be lopsided. We put more weight on a leg, place a hand on a hip, or tilt our head. The meaning of this nonverbal communication is, ‘I don’t really know’. When we are speaking with conviction on a topic that we know, our postures tends to be symmetrical - shoulders squared, firm jaw, direct gaze (politicians have this down). So, consider your foreign participant’s perspective. They watch you speak and understand little of the content of your foreign words. However, they are unconsciously gathering information about your conviction and confidence from your body language. Then, when the interpreter begins to fill in the context, they glance from her to you. The unconscious question in their minds is, "do you really mean it?" But wait - if you are looking at the interpreter with a posture that says "maybe not," what happens to your credibility? You create, yet another communication barrier when the content and process of your communication is not congruent.
So, you only need to stay conscious, manage time and space, get in sync, and act unnatural. You need to look at your audience, not your interpreter, and freeze that body language so it matches what you fervently hope your interpreter is saying to them. This will be more easily accomplished if you follow the KISS rule - keep it short and simple.
Have you ever dealt with one of those phone messaging services of the ‘listen-to-the-next 20-options’ variety? The operator drones on and on, beginning each bit with a cheery ‘push x # for ....’ You doze off for just a moment and miss your option! Then you have to push * to hear the whole mess over again. Listening to a foreign language that you don’t understand can be just as mind numbing. Unless your audience is wired for simultaneous translation á la the United Nations, your interpretation will lag. Your audience will only tolerate your meaningless ‘blah, blah, blah’ for moments before mentally moving away.
To keep them engaged and with you, you must slow down, and chunk down, your message. Don’t go on for more than a sentence or two without translation. Pause frequently, maintain eye contact, and give everyone a chance to keep up and stay together. Encourage questions - you will read them on their faces - and invite comment - making certain you stay fully engaged and in the communication flow. Help participants follow the same pattern of chunking down in short bits coming back at you. Don’t accept it when a participant talks for five minutes and the interpreter summarizes with, "he doesn’t like it." Ask for the blow-by-blows. The time this takes may be frustrating to everyone, but otherwise you risk missing important information and misunderstandings later on.
Common facilitation intervention tools may not be the norm in the culture you are addressing, but they are no less valuable. Early in your relationship, establish a few agreements, or ground rules, with your audience as you will have done in contracting with your interpreter. Recently, I was conducting a training program in Russian with former senior military officers. It was important to me to create a respectful dialogue with the audience. I suspected that they were not accustomed to American facilitation methods (the open horseshoe table configuration was novel to them) and, not speaking a word of Russian myself, I wanted to be certain that I could manage certain interactions. So, I introduced the concept of the ‘talking stick’.
I told the story of Native American elders, who, when discussing important matters, would pass a special stick among themselves to signify who should speak while others listened. I emphasized that this was because each had important information to share for the good of the tribe and each deserved everyone’s respect. Next, I admitted that I didn’t know their language, and needed and wanted to understand every comment. Then I brought out a koush ball and suggested that it serve as our ‘talking stick’. They loved this and it worked remarkably well.
I should tell you that there is no Russian equivalent for ‘koush ball’. This brings up another important tip. When it comes to specialized terms and coined expressions, use your own words. There are many, many specialized terms in every industry and function. ‘Trouble-shooting’ is another example. Ask your interpreter to explain the new term, but not to substitute another word from their language if one doesn’t truly exist. The derivative will almost always dilute your full meaning. Once the word is explained and understood, use the English term.
A picture really is worth a thousand words and, when working with an interpreter, it’s a lot faster! Take a supply of colorful markers and chart paper if you are headed to a place that may not have these resources readily available. If you can find ways to illustrate your ideas with simple drawings or models, you will save time and improve your communication. I like to draw as I speak, and if I can, I will reemphasize my point by directing attention to the drawing while my interpreter speaks.
Metaphor is a powerful learning anchor. If you can link an abstract idea, like change, to a concrete shared experience, like walking up or down a hillside, you can convey a lot of information very succinctly. Explaining that this new concept or idea is like something they already know, generally creates a level of comfort and a willingness to explore. Metaphors are usually expressed in simple concrete terms that are easily interpreted and understood. A caution, however - think through your teaching metaphors to insure that they are culturally sensitive and convey only your intended meaning.
My dear father encouraged me to travel. He told me that where ever I roamed I would find that people are just like the ones back home. I have traveled a lot since then, and Daddy was only partly right. There are a lot of cultural differences of which to be mindful. Out of ignorance, I have stumbled crossways with a few taboos. Today, with the emphasis on cultural diversity, we are generally better informed than I was in the beginning and there are many books out there to enlighten us. We should prepare and make ourselves knowledgeable about the places we visit without being timid about exporting our best. We will make mistakes, but fortunately, I have found that many courtesies are common, and genuine kindness seems to be universally understood. People understand unspoken intentions. Expect the best in people, keep a sense of humor, remain curious and deeply respect others - these are the most important ‘tricks’ of international work.
Nancy Hamm Curren, M.Ed., Principal Consultant, Team Learning, has an international background with expertise in team development, communication strategies, meeting facilitation, collaborative thinking, strategic planning and change management. She is a former Peace Corps volunteer and has lived and worked abroad for a total of ten years. Most recently, she was an advisor to the Citizens Democracy Corps which provides business consultants to former Soviet nations. Ms, Curren holds a Master of Education degree. She is an affiliate faculty member at Regis University in Denver where she teaches graduate courses in leadership and team development.