While it is quite possible for students to grasp a working knowledge of various T/I techniques even after just one semester of study at university, this knowledge will likely only be superficial. Many students unfortunately enroll in T/I courses expecting (unrealistically) to emerge after one semester or one year of study with the skills to do professional T/I. Professional translators and interpreters have undergone the necessary training and accumulated experience to understand the many underlying requirements behind T/I, including the need for the proper computer equipment (Chriss, 2000; Ward, 1992) in the case of translation work and for physical stamina (Balupuri, 1997) in the case of interpretation work. Students at university will have little time to gain an appreciation of these requirements. If the students' unrealistic expectations are not tempered into realistic ones in a timely manner, those expectations will not be met, thereby causing frustration directed at the course, the instructor, and themselves.

Students may not initially appreciate the need to begin their T/I studies by gaining a sound knowledge of the source and target languages, not to mention the socio-economic, cultural, and political backgrounds behind the languages in question (Balupuri, 1997). Cote (1990) relays two goals for the principal objectives to an introductory course on translation, which are similar and equally valid for an introductory interpretation course:

It can take some time and effort on the part of the instructor to convince the students of this second concept. Students often enroll for and attend T/I lessons expecting to do typical class activities (e.g., in-class assignments, homework, etc.). It is not uncommon for them to believe that the only prerequisite for conducting T/I is a knowledge of a foreign or second language (i.e., the language they are studying at university or have studied previously). It may take a considerable amount of persuasion to convince students that T/I requires a deep commitment on the part of the translator or interpreter, that translations are not completed by a simple, straightforward process, and that interpretation is anything but a matter of listening to one language and reproducing the message in another.

It therefore becomes necessary to tell the students that T/I requires strength in body as well as mental fortitude. To convey this message, I like to use the story of the plight of an acquaintance's Romanian friend who worked as a company secretary and who, being bilingual, was asked to do some impromptu Romanian-English interpretation work for visiting Romanian businessmen. The secretary's day of translating began at 8:00 and did not conclude until almost midnight. The next day she was absolutely exhausted and became upset when she discovered that her coworkers envied her "day off," for they thought that because she was bilingual, her speaking two languages was an easy thing for her to do. The secretary had to convince her colleagues that what she went though was both mentally and physically draining and was much more difficult than a typical day of work.

Being the interpreter, the Romanian secretary had to be available to listen to everything the native speakers of one language had to say, mentally translate it, and then produce it in the other language. Needless to say, as the only interpreter between the two groups, she had to be on hand nearly every minute the two groups were in contact with each other. She had to keep on her mental toes the entire time, thinking of appropriate phrases and words, and she had to concentrate in order to understand the meaning behind what was being said in order to translate it effectively. Additionally, she had to clearly articulate the messages from one group as she translated them for the other, and she could not just stop interpreting to take a break to catch her breath. She could not even take a trip to the restroom unless there happened to be a convenient break in the discussions!

As it turned out, the secretary had eaten almost nothing the entire day, as much of the conversation between the groups happened during gatherings at lunch and dinner. To have food in her mouth meant she could not speak and could therefore not interpret. She was often forced to watch others eat while she continued interpreting. No wonder the poor secretary was exhausted and upset with her coworkers! This story exemplifies the need for mental concentration as well as physical effort when conducting interpretation. Even sitting at a desk looking up terms in a dictionary for translation purposes requires a significant amount of energy.

To aid in getting across this concept of needing strength to the students, it may be beneficial to provide a list of the respective mind/body requirements for T/I. Researchers into T/I methods do not ignore explaining various requirements (Massoud, 1988; Ward, 1992), and for the most part they agree with each other as to what is necessary. Balupuri (1997) considers simultaneous interpreting (SI) to be the most extreme form of T/I because of the demands on the people involved and thus provides an excellent list of what is needed to do SI. Such skills are necessary (a) if one ever hopes to do SI, and (b) anything below the level of SI still requires all of these things to a relatively high degree. Balupuri advises one to have a good memory, good organizational skills, and be prepared for fatigue and stress. This list, which I have divided into mind/body requirements, also includes the following:

MIND:

Being able to read and write in the source and target languages is a prerequisite for T/I, but such skills can hardly be considered sufficient. Certainly, a good translator or interpreter need not be perfectly adept in all four skill areas of both languages. As Ward (1992) states, native fluency in the source language is not needed except for special areas. Nevertheless, all too often, the uninformed equate knowledge of a language (however superficial) to T/I ability. Knowing a language does not bestow automatic qualification on a person to be a translator or an interpreter. Even the Romanian secretary in the example story above may not have been truly prepared to interpret for a day.

That knowledge of a language does not necessarily make a translator or interpreter comes as both good and bad news for students. On the positive side, the instructor should not expect students to be proficient at the foreign or second language. Relatedly, students should not expect to have perfect command of the other language upon enrollment in a T/I course. Only those students wishing to attend professional translator schools will be expected to have already attained a high level of proficiency in the other language (Cordero, 1984), which is not the case for the brief courses provided by most universities.

On the negative side, students may be overly confident in their own foreign language ability. They may try to count their years of English study or even trips abroad as indications that they are ready to conduct T/I. A person's perspective and frame of mind can partially dictate if a person is ready to conduct T/I. The reasons outlined in Concept 2 above notwithstanding, having knowledge of a language does not automatically mean one is prepared to engage in T/I, nor does it mean the person will be good at such activities. All it means is that a prerequisite has been met.

Students may take heart in the fact that they have likely been doing translations since they first began studying English. There is often reliance placed on mental translation by language learners, which is important from a developmental perspective (Kern, 1994) as well as a language ability assessment tool, especially in Japan (Buck, 1992).

This concept follows from Concept 3 above. T/I ability does not arise directly from language learning, nor can it be said that conducting T/I is necessarily the next logical step after one has learned and practiced using another language. There is little doubt of the overlap between language learning and conducting T/I, but each uses their own methodologies (Maier, 1998). T/I is best done within the framework of constantly learning and adding skills, not just the application of current knowledge.

Instructors must impress upon potential students that one must be willing to continually learn new things in a variety of fields. Ward (1992) lists as his fifth of seven necessary skills for T/I "an elementary knowledge of, interest in and ability to learn rapidly the basics of a wide variety of technical fields and their vocabularies in all the languages with which one works even though one has no experience in these fields" (p. 579). It is not possible to expect to simply use the language ability one possesses to conduct T/I. It becomes a matter of adding and refining knowledge, including vocabulary and the four language skills.

It is simply unfortunate that the nature of translation and its function in language learning has for so long gone unspecified (Cordero, 1984). Students wishing to "kill two birds with one stone" as it were by taking an interpretation class are probably mistaken. For instance, translation practice may aid but does not necessarily foster communication skills (Maier, 1998). The very act of conducting T/I cannot be considered language learning. In fact, translation has often been used as a test instrument to assess language learning (Buck, 1992), which may or may not be appropriate, depending upon the many aspects of a particular language learning situation.

One of the main goals for translators or interpreters is to accurately communicate meaning. Similarly, a primary goal of students taking T/I classes should be to learn ways to communicate messages in one language by stating them in another. However, students must realize that conveying messages differs depending upon context. As Vinay and Darbelnet (1958, as cited in Cordero, 1984) state, there are three main areas of translation. The first area, educational, is used as a convenient means to verify comprehension and assess accuracy. The second area, professional, is for making others rather than oneself understand. The third area, linguistic, is for research (i.e., for linguistic analysis). As T/I students are not being tested on their comprehension per se, nor are they conducting linguistic research, university T/I students should understand that their aim for translations lies squarely in the professional area, the reasons for which are twofold.

First, university students most likely have already passed through the educational area to reach their current position. In other words, the students should already have had their comprehension and accuracy in the language tested and verified in their language learning classes. The other area, linguistic, is often rather complicated and above the purposes of most university T/I classes. Students should be working to overcome the difficulties found in making others understand (i.e., how to communicate a source-language meaning in the target language so that it may best be comprehended), which is precisely why Cote (1990) insists that students realize the catastrophic consequences behind guessing when conducting T/I. Guessing indicates a lack of full understanding. If one is unsure of a meaning, how is it possible to make others understand via a translation or an interpretation?

As an aid to help others comprehend meaning, Massoud (1988) recommends that translators ask two basic questions about the source language message:

Even supposing that the students (prospective or otherwise) have understood the first five concepts above, they may not wish to recognize this sixth concept. A student enthusiastic about T/I can quickly become dejected and disillusioned when asked to translate material that is outside of his or her areas of interest. To give an all-too-common example, students interested in foreign music and movies - the very reasons they became interested in English and, by extension, T/I in the first place - may balk at the idea of translating "boring" material such as newspaper clippings or sections of children's books. However, in a majority of cases in the real world, translation work is not about choosing assignments. Both full-time and freelance translators should have knowledge in specialized content areas (Weiss, 1995), which should of course be an area that provides the translator or interpreter some interest, but they cannot just decline to translate documents if those documents do not coincide with their own areas of interest.

Thus, at the university level, translations should be about practice and gaining perspective on how to approach translations. Assignments should come from a variety of sources (Cote, 1990) and should allow students to work both to and from English and the students' native language (Maier, 1998). A good instructor will attempt to provide students assignments from a wide range of areas if the course does not have a specific theme behind it and, of course, if time permits (which often it does not). For instance, the instructor may take material from computer magazines, advertisements, television sitcoms, or even from the school catalog, so long as the messages and sources are varied and provide students with challenges and an opportunity to practice.

Although I am in complete agreement with Hu (1999) that an interpretation of a text depends upon what the translator brings to the reading of the original text and that individual interpretations can arise from any number of sources (cultural background, subject-matter familiarity, etc.), there are aspects of a text that are inherent components of that text, and as such the translator must come to terms with the fact that his or her own cognitions and intuitions about meanings can only come after close inspection of the text. Students often fail to ask the fundamental questions that a translator must ask about a text, including its original purpose and its intended purpose after translation.

Many authors in addition to Hu (e.g., Cordero, 1984; Ishikawa, 1995; Massoud, 1988) have addressed what questions a translator should ask of him/herself (and of the text), and there is a great deal of overlap in what they say. In general, before beginning any assignment, the translator or interpreter should at minimum ask the following questions as the first step in obtaining the best possible translation:

Following from Concept 7 above, students must be prepared to move beyond the limitations presented by vocabulary. Such limitations can be simplified and placed into two categories: word meanings from a linguistic perspective and word meanings from a cultural perspective.

To explain the former, imagine the students come across the word "minute." Upon initial inspection, students may quickly conclude that this word has the meaning of "a unit of time sixty seconds in duration." However, suppose the sentence in question is: "The minute amount of work presented the girl little problem." The meaning and pronunciation of the word "minute" turns out to be quite different from the students' initial (and erroneous) conclusion. Unless students attempt to decode the author's meaning behind this sentence (and the sentences around this sentence), they will remain confused about its meaning, or worse, they will translate it incorrectly.

It hence becomes imperative that instructors convey how source language words cannot simply be translated into target language words without taking context into account. One-to-one correspondence between words is rare, and terms in one language may not even have linguistic or cultural references in the other language. This occasionally occurs because words are but the mechanism by which "whole areas of meaning" (Cordero, 1984, p. 353) are conveyed.

Words do not only differ in terms of lexical meaning. Words may also present cultural connotations that must be acknowledged and dealt with, which can be one of the most difficult yet common challenges to a translator (Cincotta, 1995). As language has been described as being that which is reflective of a cultural system (Balupuri & Munjal, 1997), the attempt to find a common middle ground between two different linguistic systems has been the job (and one may say, ultimate challenge) of translators for millennia. For instance, there may be a word or phrase in the source language that has no direct or even indirect equivalent in the target language. How the translator will get across the meaning requires a deep understanding of the cultural connotations behind the word. It therefore becomes necessary for translators to be good writers who, as discussed above, can balance faithfulness and naturalness and who can keep and convey the meaning behind the original yet not reduce the finished product to what would obviously be a translation (Massoud, 1988).

Just as it is important to stress that translation can only begin when the questions in Concept 7 above have been answered, a translation cannot be considered complete when the act of translation has been concluded. Unlike assignments in other university courses, such as the filling in of worksheets or answering questions in a workbook, the translator cannot consider a translation complete after the last word has been written or after the last key on the keyboard has been struck. T/I assignments encompass the tasks of checking, proofreading, editing, and assessing the translation after the initial translation has been completed. The same can be said for interpretation, where the interpreter does not just state something in the target language and then completely forget about it. A good interpreter will mentally assess his or her interpretation and make adjustments. If the interpreter realizes a mistake has been made, it is usually possible to interject at some point and rectify the error. The point to be stressed is that at the end of a translation, the translator (or interpreter) should reread, reanalyze, and reassess, possibly several times.

This notion of continual reassessment of translations is not new. Other authors present similar steps (see Rose, 1981), but I find Percival's (1983, as cited in Cote, 1990) five recommended steps the simplest for presentation in T/I courses:

This final concept is partially an offshoot of Concept 9 and partially from personal experience of teaching translation at the university level. It is meant to impress upon the students that undertaking T/I work is serious business not to be taken lightly. Many a translator has struggled long into the night, alone, to find the right wording for a translated phrase. The interpreter has long had to endure demanding listeners and unsympathetic speakers in the quest to relay messages and meanings between languages. True translators and interpreters, whether professional or freelance, understand the commitment involved with T/I work. They would not quit halfway through a project, nor would they complete a project without having exhausted every resource available to produce the best work possible.

Although university T/I students should not be held to the same exacting standards, they should be made to see that discipline and effort are keys to T/I success, and as such, university T/I courses will likely require more discipline than most other courses, including other English courses. As Ward (1992) states, "a translator must be a self-starter, an independent worker with a good dose of perseverance and determination to see a project through without any guidance or supervision, and often without any help even with specialized terminology" as well as have "solid integrity to do the very best job possible, to be absolutely accurate, to avoid taking any shortcuts or doing any 'fudging'" (p. 580).