Interpreting into B: The Japanese Experience

Abstract

This study conducted a questionnaire survey in an attempt to find out how interpreters evaluate their interpretation when interpreting to their ‘B’ language, particularly to English. In order to compare the similar situations of Korea and Japan, the same questionnaire employed by Professor Lim in her study was used in this study. Majority of respondents (more than 80% of the participants have experience of interpreting more than 1,000 times) answered that 30-50% of their job assignments are to interpret from Japanese to English. Only 19% of the interpreters in the survey responded that the interpretation into English is easier to perform and 54% said that the interpretation from Japanese into English does not pose any relative difficulty. The study found the following points of interest: 1) 35% of the participants answered that it is difficult to interpret Japanese into English because of the ambiguities of Japanese original text. 2) 14% of the respondents said that the syntactic differences between Japanese and English pose difficulty in the case of simultaneous interpretation. 3) Four participants argued that interpretation training into the English language should be reinforced. 4) Many interpreters mentioned that they perform their interpretation work with anxiety because there are not any clear-cut solutions to the situations described in this study.