Ep. 1: Introducing The Connected Interpreter Podcast

Watch in ASL

Hi, welcome to the connected interpreter podcast, where we will explore ways of staying connected to ourselves in our work, acknowledging the impact of our practices and continuing to grow as practice professionals and as humans. I’m Amanda Smith, an interpreter, educator, coach and creative. I’d love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting the complexities of human interaction and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference. Today’s episode is about this series and kind of the launch of this podcast as well. And so I’m going to be covering kind of the overview and what you can expect for now it’s ever evolving and ever unfolding.

One of the things that I want to incorporate in this podcast is reflective prompts for you to respond to and chew on as you listen to the podcast. So I’m going to start with the questions and I’m going to end with the questions. So the questions that I’ve outlined are:

• what if anything is sparking your care for yourself, the work and others?
• Do you feel moved to take any action? If so, what is that action and when will you do it?
• What questions arise? What insights and connections do you see to yourself?
  So just keep those in mind as we let things unfold.

The Framework of the Connected Interpreter

I’ve been an interpreter educator for a while, working with pre service interpreters as well as seasoned interpreters who are wanting to advance in their skill set to be leaders and or teachers of interpreting. And this last couple of years, I’ve returned to the pre service classroom focused on technical skills. And one of the things that has developed out of that experience is, I’m not sure whether it’s a framework or I’m going to go with framework for now of the title of this podcast, which is the connected interpreter. So what I found when I was training pre service interpreters is that the technical skills were only a part of it, and the technical skills needed a little more nuanced to them as well.

There’s long been a discussion, depending where you live, on the internet and in what communities you’re in, about this idea that interpreting is a practice profession from Robyn Dean and Bob Pollard and the work of demand control schema and really their work is focusing on that professional practice aspect of it, and the technical aspect has has been thought of as just the language, the processing skills, those kinds of things that we could kind of point to as the technical aspects.

And all of that is true.

And I also found that there were these other kind of areas that really helped students reach the point of being able to function properly and leverage the technical skills that they had through kind of this, this lens of being a connected interpreter.

So I want to give you an overview of what I’ve developed and how I interact with students around that. This is just a cursory introduction to it, and then I want to do a series that dives into each of the areas of connection, including guest speakers. That’s not right, guests, just guests on my podcast. You can tell I’m a teacher when I talk about guest speakers, but guests to the podcast who can share their particular take on these areas of connection.

Somatics & Interpreting Course Blurb

So, before I jump into that, let me say that this episode is brought to you by my online course somatic practices for interpreters. It’s a uniquely designed professional development experience that includes content via reading and a private podcast stream, real time engagement, individual coaching and more. And if you sign up to join now, you’ll be able to participate in our first upcoming real time zoom session on the fourth Monday of August, from four to six Pacific time. You’ll also have plenty of time to complete and have your CEUs processed in December. It is 2.9 CEUs, if you complete all of the elements, and you can find out more and register at arsmithstudios.com.

Connecting to….

All right, so as I said, this kind of developed as I was teaching this, these classes to pre service interpreters. And there are a number of areas, and as I delve into each of them, I’ll also talk about kind of where they came from. But we’ll start with connecting to self, being present with yourself in order to.

To hold space for consumers. So connecting to yourself as a person. What do you need as a person and then also as a professional? So that’s the first area of connection. And then connect, they don’t necessarily go in a particular order, so this is just kind of the order that they emerged as I was teaching this class, connecting to consumers. So our work is very consumer driven, and that means we need to know who our consumers are, what they need, what their language looks like, what their goals are, etc, etc, etc, right? So connecting to consumers is a big part of how we approach our work,

Connecting to the context, this is the physical context as well as the context in which the material is being given. So are we at a conference, and this is one of the tracks. Are we in a, you know, post secondary class, and this is the 12th week of a 15 week class. Are we in a business meeting, a job interview? Right? So there’s these, these contexts that are both physical and also, I was going to say contextual, which is the word, but also content, context, relational context,

Then connecting to the content itself, so the content of that day, the content to that day, right?

And then there’s connecting to teams. And by this one, I mean the actual interpreting team that may be present, and this could be people who are present in the moment, but also, if you think of team on a larger level, the interpreter who did the previous quarter of staff meetings, and then now I’m doing this quarter of staff meetings, that sort of thing.

Then over top all of that, is a connection to the industry and the professional community.

Integrating the Connected Interpreter Framework with Demand Control Schema

Please know that my background has a heavy, heavy influence and engagement with the demand control schema, and I actually partner with Robyn in another business venture, doing work around DCS and supervision and those sorts of things. So there might be some things that look or feel similar and they’re not similar in the sense of like the DCS framework has environmental, inter interpersonal and para linguistic and intrapersonal demands. I kind of think of the this connection framework as kind of like the controls that you have

in preparing for and doing your work as an interpreter. So the controls I can employ, and I can delve into this a little bit deeper when I go into each of the sections, but the controls at my disposal are connecting to self, connecting to consumers, connecting to context, content teams and the industry at large. So that connection, or those controls, would work in concert with any DCS analysis that you might do.

So again, if we go back to the classroom where I kind of developed these, this, kind of look at how we can what controls we can employ. My students also do DCS analysis to understand what is happening. And then this is kind of the the fleshing out or specifying nuancing of the controls kind of arena of pre, during and post. And so these are things that you can do and think about in particular arenas in a pre, during and post assignment way.

So, my plan from here is to spend time on each of these particular areas and talk through what each of those areas does, and how I’ve seen it help my students and myself in our work, and what I think you can do as a practicing interpreter to really connect there.

I do think one of the missing narratives of our Interpreter Education is the the self component and the connecting to self. And so I probably will have a bigger kind of portion of that talking through some various somatic activities, mindset activities, those kinds of things to help us be really present in our work and talk through how that sounds. Contrary to the idea that I’m there to serve others. I’m there to serve as a connection between these other people. It’s not actually my event. Those kinds of.

Things which are also true, right? It’s a both and it’s not an either or.

And then, like I said, I will be inviting guests to join me and share some of their perspectives on these particular arenas.

Reflective Questions for the Listener

So I think that’s it for this episode. And I want you to think about these things, and I want you to think about what might have sparked care for you, if you felt moved to action, if there were questions or wonderments that came up for you, insights, connections, any of those kinds of things. I’d love to hear from you about your insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click the newsletter button and the upper right menu.

One of the people I was talking to about this podcast had mentioned the idea of, if you’re going to ask a question, answer a question, answer those questions. And so I think I’m just going to take a minute to look at these reflective questions that I gave you at the beginning and give kind of my thoughts.

So what if anything is sparking care for yourself, the work and others. Now it’s a little self serving, because this is my content, but I I care deeply about the work of interpreting. I care deeply about humans having access to communication and connection to other humans, knowledge, experience, those kinds of things. And so even talking about this and putting this out there is activating my care for the work and for others, and the care for myself is in the sharing. It’s the in the sharing to see what happens, what people come back with, what people are moved to say or do or think or ponder or change a lens, the questions that arise for me is kind of the distinguishing of this from DCS, but also with DCS. It’s something that I have been working on/ through as I have developed this for my students, as I’m not interested in being redundant, I’m interested in being complimentary. And so does this really offer something additional, or are these teaching prompts that help students think about all these aspects, but practicing interpreters already do kind of automatically, and they don’t need it spelled out. So that’s a question that arises for me, is, is, what is the benefit of articulating this for practicing interpreters, or brand new interpreters or seasoned interpreters? Is there a benefit? And what is what is that benefit?

And then connections to myself, or insights to myself, I think, is kind of what I just said about what question questions arise, and really being with the unfolding of this and what comes of it. Really, my goal is to open conversation and share something that has been helpful for my students and for myself in terms of thinking about the connections and the connections required to do the work of interpreting.

So, those are my answers. I’m curious what yours are.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai