NOVA渋谷エリアコミュのトムさんの７月３１日のNOVA渋谷本校クラブ２のプレゼンの内容（英文）

　別個のトピックや僕テリーの７月３１日分の書きましたように、この日、全国で僅か２人しかいない、という究極のレベル１の英語レベルを保有されるトムさんによる、素晴らしい講演がNOVA渋谷本校のクラブ２のプレゼンとして行われました。その後トムさんからその日のプレゼンを録音したものをわざわざテープ起こしして下さって、こちらや僕の日記などでの発表のために僕に送ってきて下さいました。そこでその英文をそのままここに掲載させて頂きます。英語学習のため、どうかご興味のある皆さん、ご参照なさって下さいね。

トムさん、本当に何から何までどうも有り難うございます。掲載が遅くなってしまい、申し訳ありませんでした。また今後とも我々英語学習のと途上にある後身のため、何卒ご指導を宜しくお願い申し上げます。ｍ（_　_）ｍ


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“My Relationship with English and Interpretation”
(transcription)
Masayuki Tominaga　(冨永正之)
Shibuya Honko Club 2 Voice
July 31, 2006

I do not have any handout to pass out to you. I thought about preparing something, but I thought that if I just read a text or something, then my talk would sound stilted (unnatural and stiff), so I thought that maybe I would talk extemporaneously, off the cuff. Although I may be running the risk of going off on a tangent and digressing a lot, still I thought it would sound a little bit more natural if I just speak off the cuff.

I will divide my talk into three parts. In the first part I will talk a little bit about myself and my relationship with English. In the second part I will talk about interpreting. And in the third part I will play some tapes of my interpreting, both simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting.

So let’s get into the substance of my talk. My relationship with English started just like everybody else in Japan when I entered junior high school. I didn’t study English at all at junior high school and completely neglected the study of English. As a result I graduated from junior high school without learning any English at all.

There was a reason for not studying English seriously at junior high school. In those days in Kanagawa prefecture, which is my prefecture, they used to have a test called “the achievement test”, and it was an important criterion in deciding who will get into which high school. In those days English was not part of this achievement test, so I thought that it wouldn’t make any difference whether I study English or not. It was really a bad attitude to take toward the study of English but that was actually what I did, that is, I totally neglected the study of English. So I ended up learning no English at all when I graduated.

When I got into senior high school, one of the teachers who taught English to us apparently wanted to see how well the freshmen had studied or learned English at their respective junior high schools. So he gave us an English test. I did so badly on the test that when the teacher after grading the test papers gave the papers back to us, he stopped me and sternly warned me that unless I shape up and start studying English seriously he would have to flunk me.

So I got really scared into studying English seriously. I didn’t want to fail. I neglected all the other subjects. By the time I graduated from senior high school, English, which started as my worst subject, ended up being my best subject. “Best” doesn’t mean in my case that I really learned English so well that my English became great; nothing like that. When I became a senior high school student, I started to study English from scratch so to speak. I bought some reference books about English grammar, how to read English and how to write English and so forth. I started with the basics of English studies. I managed to learn English grammar and how to read English, but I was far from being really proficient in English.

Because English turned out to be my best subject, I decided to major in English at university. So I entered Aoyama Gakuin University and majored in British and American literature. Since my major was English literature, I thought I better learn to speak English. Until I got into college, I hadn’t learned to speak English at all, so I didn’t speak almost a word of English. I of course knew basic English expressions like “thank you”, “good bye” and so forth, but that was about the limit of my English.

I joined the ESS, the English Speaking Society of Aoyama Gakuin University. Because I didn’t speak English at all, all the other members, particularly sophomores, juniors, and seniors, when they spoke English, their English sounded really good to me. Their English sounded good to me, because I couldn’t tell good English from bad English. My English conversation skill was practically nil, I was in no position to judge their English, but their English sounded great.

That caused me to have huge inferiority complex, and this inferiority complex haunted me throughout my college life. As a result my college days were pretty dark and gloomy. I don’t have any happy memories of my college life.

But I must have studied English to a degree successfully, because when I was a junior, I took Eiken STEP level 1 test, I surprisingly managed to pass it. So I got the Eiken level 1 certificate when I was a junior at the university.

Then I graduated from the university and joined a Japanese company. The company was a shipping company run by a notorious businessman by the name of Hideki Yokoi. This name may sound familiar to you, but he was really a notorious businessman, I think. When I decided to take the test to get into this company, I really didn’t know much about him. I may have heard vaguely about him.

Anyway I got a job with this company and started there, but the first day I was in the office, I felt really bad vibes from the office. Particularly some of the female employees were badmouthing their own company. They were really speaking ill of the company, saying nasty things like “if you work here for a few years, you will find out what kind of company this is.” That really scared me. I thought the company didn’t have much future, so I decided to quit the company. After having worked there only two days, I decided to quit. So I sent in my resignation and became jobless. I had to find a job.

Then an idea hit me that maybe I could get a job with this US military base, which happened to be located in Zama pretty close to my house. I lived in Odakyu Sagamihara. Zama is pretty close to Odakyu Sagamihara. They have this US military base, which serves as the headquarters for the US Army. And I thought that if I worked there I would be able to talk with American soldiers in English, and that would be a great opportunity for me to brush up on my English.

So I decided to work there, and I got a very lowly job of a clerk typist. I didn’t care what kind of pay I would get or what kind of job it was. As long as I could get to speak to American soldiers and as a result if I could improve my English speaking skills, that would be good enough. So I started working there.

But my father apparently was not very happy with me working on a US military base after he had sent me to college; he got a job interview arranged with this company where my father had an acquaintance. Through this acquaintance of my father’s, I was given a company entrance exam. I took a written exam and an interview and was accepted. Because I spoke English a little, I was assigned to the overseas sales department of the company.

This company no longer exits. It was disbanded several years after I quit the company. This company used to make an airplane called YS-11, the first domestically manufactured passenger plane, a 60-seater turbo-jet. So I was assigned to the overseas sales department. I quickly discovered that I was not cut out for a salesman. I felt very depressed and miserable everyday I was in the office. I put up with this very negative work environment for a year and a half or so, but finally I couldn’t take it any more. I couldn’t stand it any more. I felt so miserable that I decided to leave the company. So maybe a year and a half after I started with the company, I turned in my resignation and quit the company. Once again I became jobless.

I decided to go back to the US military base, so I went back there and started as a clerk typist once again. Then I applied for more highly graded positions a couple of times and was accepted in those positions. I worked there for a year and a half or so. Then I was riffed. RIF means reduction in force, which is a military jargon, I think. It means I got laid off. So once again I became jobless.

So I started looking for a job and one day I was reading the newspaper and found that the American Embassy had set up this committee or office or something that was designed to help ex-US military base Japanese employees, who used to work for US military facilities but who got laid off, find a new job. So I inquired with the personnel office of the American Embassy, and they said, “Yes, we have that kind of office set up but we have a vacancy within the American Embassy, so why don’t you apply”.

I applied for the job, and the job that I applied for was titled translator/interpreter. So I decided to work there. Because I had had relatively little experience interpreting – I had interpreted on several occasions both while working for the Japanese company and while I was working on the US military base – but still my interpreting experience was extremely limited, so my boss, who was a Japanese-American and bilingual, very fluent in both Japanese and English – I thought that his Japanese was actually better than his English, but he said that he thought as far as his speaking went, he felt more comfortable speaking English, and as far as his writing went, he said he could write Japanese better than English. But I felt like his Japanese sounded more natural to me than his English. But anyway he was bilingual.

And so he gave me translation assignments, and I translated various government documents like the President’s state of the union addresses, speeches, press conferences, and cabinet members’ press conferences, important statements, and so forth. I translated these documents for a year or so, and then my boss asked me if I would be interested in interpreting, because my job title required me to interpret as well. I tentatively said yes, although I had very negative experiences with interpreting previous to joining the American Embassy. I felt that because my job title required me to interpret, I was not in a position to say, “No, I don’t want to interpret.” So I said yes kind of timidly, then he started giving me interpreting assignments.

The kind of interpreting I did was so-called conference interpreting where we have an American speaker come from the United States or sometimes we recruit an American expert available in Japan and have him speak on his area of expertise. We put the speaker together with Japanese audience members and have a lecture-discussion session. That was the kind of setup where I interpreted.

I interpreted on average maybe from 120 to 150-60 times a year. So I was kept pretty busy interpreting. I started working for the American Embassy in 1970, and as I said, in the first year I just translated. Then from the second year on I began to interpret. I retired when my retirement age came, which was 2004. I began in 1970 and retired in 2004, so I interpreted 33 years altogether because for the first year I was just translating. So 33 years times 140 or so means that I must have interpreted like 4,500 times or so, I suppose, in my interpreting career with the American Embassy.

While I was working for the American Embassy, I was asked to teach interpreting courses at this school where I still teach. That happened in 1990, I think. Then several years later, I think it was 1997 or so, I was asked to teach at still another language school, interpreting courses there too. And I still keep that job too, so I teach interpreting more or less regularly at these two schools.

As far as my relationship with NOVA goes, I became a NOVA student in 1991, I think, and I was admitted at level 3. The interviewer, the NOVA teacher who interviewed me said that he wanted to enroll me at level 2, but he said – I don’t know if he was being truthful or not, but in those days he said that he was not authorized to enroll anybody at level 2. He checked with his supervisor, who was working in another school, on the phone, and he came back to me saying, “No, I was not given the green light to admit you at level 2.” So I was admitted at level 3. But he promised me that he would give me a level-up test soon after I start taking lessons. And I was promoted to level 2 maybe just a few weeks after I started at NOVA.

I don’t remember exactly when, but I began to entertain a desire to take a level-1 test. And I asked them to give me a level-1 test maybe a few years after I started with NOVA. It must have been 1994 or 5. They were very, very reluctant to give me the test, giving me an excuse like “we don’t have the level-1 test material; we don’t have any level 1 test prepared”. And they hemmed and hawed and they were really dragging their feet.

But I didn’t give up easily. I persisted. They finally called me back and said, “Yes, we have finally made the level-1 test, so you can come and take the test.” So I went to the school that used to be located in Kabukicho. That school has been closed for many years now, but anyway I went there and was given the test.

The kind of test that they gave me consisted of two parts, I think, and in the first part I was made to read this fairly lengthy paper about language. And based on that paper, I was given many questions that I had to answer. In the second part, this interviewer came prepared with some topics for debating, and he said that he wanted to debate with me.

I don’t remember what topics we debated, but maybe we debated a few different topics. And he said that he was not really authorized to give me a fail or pass result right on the spot and that he had somebody working above him, the ultimate boss, I think. And he said he would have to tape this debating session with me so that he would be able to let his boss hear the debate and they would jointly decide whether they would pass me or fail me.

So I waited anxiously after the test, and maybe a few weeks after the test they called me and said I had passed. So I became level 1. At that time I didn’t think about its consequences like the kind of pressure that I am feeling right now, because I am apparently the only level-1 student in Tokyo at least or in Kanto or whatever – I don’t know how many level-1 students there are in the whole of Japan -- but anyway according to NOVA’s definition of level 1, I think you are supposed to speak English more or less like a native speaker.

I never feel like I speak English like a native speaker. I feel very inadequate when it comes to English. So whenever I go to a voice room, I feel I am under pressure to measure up to the level-1 English, however you define it. I try not to worry too much about measuring up to or living up to the kind of expectation that other NOVA students might have about my English.

So that has been my relationship with English. It has been a rather ambivalent relationship. I feel like I’ve been encouraged by the progress that I’ve made in learning English, but I think I’ve been more often discouraged and disappointed in my English, because in my case at least, I don’t know about other people, studying English and making progress in learning English has been such a painfully slow process. I’ve been constantly frustrated and I’ve always felt challenged by the difficulty of learning English. I cannot escape from this sense of inferiority complex that I first began to have when I was a university student.

Maybe that’s not a very healthy attitude whatever you try to do. If you want to make progress in whatever you are doing, you should have a positive attitude. I have a rather negative attitude, always being burdened by the sense of inferiority complex. So I don’t recommend that you take the same kind of approach or attitude in learning English or learning any other thing.

Have I covered everything that I wanted to cover? I’m not sure. OK. Maybe you are interested to know how I have been struggling with English. I have not come up with any really good way to learn English effectively or efficiently. I suspect that there is no magic or no secret to learning English. You have to struggle and get frustrated from time to time. If it were so easy, I think nobody would have any trouble learning English or any other languages for that matter.

The only think I can think of in terms of making progress in learning a foreign language is to maximize your exposure to the language that you are studying, to try to speak it as much as possible, to try to listen to it as much as possible, to try to think in that language as much as possible, try to write that language as much as possible. So in short try to expose yourself to that language as much as you can. And I think that is after all the shortcut to learning a language, if there is a shortcut.

I don’t like to be constantly looking for a shortcut. I think looking for a shortcut is a rather lazy way to learn anything. Finding a shortcut may not be a very productive approach, I suppose.

Now I would like to next talk a little bit about interpreting. The kind of interpreting I did, as I explained, is called conference interpreting. There is a so-called in-house interpreting where a company employee or government office employee may be asked to interpret. Such people happen to be proficient in a particular language sufficiently so that they can serve as an interpreter. In that kind of situation where an employee of a particular organization is asked to interpret, what happens is rather different from the kind of interpreting that I used to do while I was with the American Embassy, that is, conference interpreting.

In conference interpreting, what you aim for is maximum fidelity, maximum accuracy. You try to minimize omissions. You try to be as faithful to the speaker as possible. That is the kind of interpreting that should occur in conference interpreting. But in the case of in-house interpreting, there may be room for various other ancillary considerations. For instance, you have to think about the best interest of your company, and if the person that you are interpreting for makes a slip of the tongue or says something that may be detrimental to the interest of the company, in that case maybe as an in-house interpreting you can be given a license to somehow make adjustments or somehow gloss over what he said. You may not have to be accurate. Being accurate may turn out to be a disservice to the interest of the company. So in that case you as an interpreter are given greater latitude or discretion in deciding what to interpret and what not to interpret, what to omit, what not to omit, and so forth.

But in the case of conference interpreting, you are hired as a third party, as a completely neutral person to interpret, so what you are expected to do is to do your best in terms of accuracy and faithfulness, and to perform at the top of your ability in terms of naturalness of delivery and so forth.

A tour guide may be considered as doing a sort of interpreting in a sense. But a tour guide is interpreting culture in a sense, not interpreting other people’s remarks, comments, statements and so forth. So that is a different kind of interpreting. In the case of a tour guide, he or she is interpreting a particular country’s culture, explaining in detail various tourist attractions and so forth. So that should be distinguished from the kind of interpreting that I used to do.

As for the style of interpreting, there are basically three types of interpreting. One is simultaneous interpreting – well I should start with consecutive interpreting. Most people start with practicing consecutive interpreting, because it’s considered to be easier than simultaneous interpreting, but I do not necessarily agree with that understanding of consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. I don’t know which is harder.

To laymen, who are outside the business of interpreting, simultaneous interpreting appears to be a super-human performance, almost like magic. You have to have a good foundation in terms of the ability to interpret consecutively. Unless you have a solid base of consecutive interpreting skills, you cannot move up to simultaneous interpreting. As long as you’ve learned to interpret consecutively very well, then the transition from consecutive interpreting to simultaneous interpreting should not be so difficult.

What it takes when you move from consecutive interpreting to simultaneous interpreting is a lot of practice, a lot of experience, and as you gain more experience through hard training and hard practice, you’ll learn the knack so to speak, you‘ll learn the ropes so to speak, you’ll develop the requisite skills in interpreting simultaneously. But unless you can interpret very well consecutively, you cannot expect to interpret well simultaneously.

The third style of interpreting is so-called whispering interpreting. With simultaneous interpreting, interpreters usually work as a team, typically two people together. Where there are several languages involved, there may be a lot of interpreters who are interpreting between different languages. What occurs in that situation is relay interpreting, that is, French may be interpreted into English, and English may be interpreted into Spanish, and so forth, or French may be interpreted into German, and German may be interpreted into English, and English may be interpreted into Japanese and so forth. There are very few Japanese interpreters who are versed enough or proficient enough in several languages, so they have to listen to a European interpreter, for instance, interpreting French into English, then a Japanese interpreter will interpret that English into Japanese.

When you are interpreting simultaneously, you always work in an interpreters’ booth, you listen with a headphone, and you speak into a microphone. So that’s what happens when you are interpreting simultaneously. You work with the interpreting equipment.

But sometimes it so happens that you don’t have the benefit of the interpreting equipment. Sometimes there may be a kind of financial consideration, in other words, the sponsor or the host of a particular meeting does not have the interpreting equipment or they may think it would cost too much to rent the equipment, or they don’t think that the session is important enough to justify the extra financial cost of renting the equipment.

Then what happens is that you will interpret simultaneously in order to save time, but you will whisper into the ear of the listener. That is, I may have an American sitting next to me, and I will whisper into his ear while listening to and translating what a Japanese speaker is saying into English, or vice versa, that is, an English speaker may be speaking, and I will be whispering into the ear of a Japanese listener. So you will not speak too loudly. You don’t have to shout. You just whisper so that other people will not be disturbed by your interpreting, because they will not be listening with an earphone. So if you speak too loudly, that will get in the way of communication. So you speak softly. That is called whispering interpreting.

We still have some time left, right? Five minutes! Really? Shall I play some tapes then?

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