The Irreplaceable Pearl at the Heart of Human Connectedness

Community focus

When I returned to the US, I eventually landed — where I still am now — in a remote small town in California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. It seemed an unlikely place to continue my interpreting journey, but I moved there just as the huge wave of immigration that swept across the United States in the 1990s arrived in the isolated region. In less than a decade, small communities would go from having almost no diversity to becoming up to 50% Latino.

Once again, my bilingual skill set was in constant demand, but this time to serve as the language bridge between newly arrived immigrants and our woefully unprepared schools, social services, and health clinics. The years I spent shuttling between small-town government offices, homes, classrooms, and doctors’ offices provided example after example of how just one person providing the language link to life-sustaining services could cascade into much bigger, positive impacts for the broader community.

One newly arrived immigrant woman was able to access supportive mental health services, and eventually became a preschool teacher and then program administrator. More than a dozen immigrant women successfully created licensed, home-based childcare centers, which allow them to make a living and provide an urgently needed service to other working, immigrant families. Many of their grown children now work as trained bilingual staff providing language access to the community on a regular basis. And the initial ad hoc interpreting I provided in my local area ultimately helped two local hospitals seek assistance in setting up formal interpreting services programs, which exist to this day.

These are small personal examples that mirror those of countless other interpreters providing services in their own communities. They capture the beauty of the pearl, forged from imperfection. Through small encounters, individual connections are made. A family gets enough food for the month. A child gets the special education services they need.

Each one of these interpreted encounters requires talent, training, and professional acumen. To be successful, interpreters need the ability to observe the complex cultural and socioeconomic dynamics in play, as well as an understanding of the human condition and the situational context. This is what human interpreters do day in and day out. They are impossible to fully replicate through technology.

And, mostly, they are women.

Making it official

Eventually, I understood that my occasional side gig was in fact a potential lifelong career. I made my way to the Middlebury Institute of International Studies for formal education and training in translation and interpretation. I raised my hand, as so many others were doing, to contribute to professional associations and early initiatives that helped build community interpreting in the US.

I found myself surrounded by the backbone of community and legal interpreting: mostly female immigrants from all over the world who were also drawn into interpreting because their language skills were urgently needed.

Why is interpreting dominated by women? There are many answers to that question, some of which I can name here. In general, outside of conference interpreting, interpreting is a field with a low barrier to entry that often begins as low-paid, relatively low-prestige work. It provides mostly freelance work with flexible hours that can accommodate family responsibilities effectively.

The good news is that interpreting can also function as a pathway to opportunity for many immigrant women, who climb the ladder from practitioner to better-paid roles inside and outside of our profession. These roles tap the full range of the talent and experience they bring to their adopted countries — in training, education, project management, entrepreneurship, leadership, and agency ownership, which immeasurably strengthen our profession.

Looking to the future

Now, 30-plus years into this career, my work plays out on two fronts. As a training specialist focused on supporting the development of remote interpreters, I remain firmly embedded in the oyster’s shell, hoping to help pry out new pearls from the tens of thousands of individuals who provide the same language bridge remotely that onsite interpreters always have. My role also lands me on the flipside, in the heart of technological change that seeks to fill the gaps where no human interpreter currently goes and will likely never go, because there simply will never be enough of us.

As machine translation and generative AI become ever more effective, the temptation to have it fully replace human interpreters will grow. We are far enough along with technological transformation throughout society to know its unfettered adoption can lead to catastrophe. Technology’s translation of words, and now full sentences, is rarely the same as a complete transfer of meaning between two people or groups of people, or even between nations. And when meaning is lost, our existence is genuinely impoverished.

As we embrace the opportunities of technology, we must do so while mindfully and intentionally preserving the role of human interpreters. Let’s make sure to take the necessary steps to protect the educational, training, and employment pathways essential to the human side of interpreting.

It is my sincere hope that we will, as an industry and as a species, understand that “accuracy” defined as words captured is only a small part of how language connects us. We must never lose sight of this pearl of wisdom, or we risk losing the irreplaceable expertise that only humans can contribute.