It is astonishing how much of a difference it makes where you are standing in life when it comes to adopting new technologies … I recently had the privilege as a CAI (Computer-Aide Interpreting) trainer to spend two very intensive days of „intergenerational“ CAI training. The first one was our internal CAI day, where trainers and students of Cologne‘s Masters of Conference Interpreting Programme spent a day together in TH Köln’s CAI Campus. The second one was quite an experience: The mentoring programme of our German conference interpreters‘ association, VKD, paid a visit, bringing a highly motivated group of almost 40 mentors and mentees. The CAI Campus has 16 seats, so my co-trainer Nele and I had to come up with a sophisticated (and flexible) system of rotating turns to make sure everyone got their fair share of practice in the booth and the matching pairs of mentors and mentees shared booths.
In both cases the participants spent an entire day testing a series of tools for Computer-Aided Interpreting. And in both groups the surveys and discussions showed a tendency I hadn’t observed so far. The initial optimism and positive attitude towards AI-based live support in the booth deteriorated after practical testing across the board and for both the participants with 0-2 years of experience and those with 10-20 years. So far, my experience has been that the effect is usually the other way around. Maybe, after quite some scepticism when the first tools came up, the – hypothetical – idea of having live support in the booth has somewhat become generally accepted. Hypothetical because live CAI support in simultaneous interpreting so far does not seem to be a common thing in practice. A lot of theoretical discussion and studies, combined with lack of practical experience, maybe have created too positive an idea, if not to say illusion, of the perfect digital boothmate. High time to bring theory and practice together and get hands-on practice!
So far, so good. But the best was yet to come: hearing the thoughts of both youngsters and old hands in our final discussions was truely enlightening. For example, younger interpreters seem to care more about UI features like being able to turn the display to dark mode – something I as a Gen X person was rather oblivious to. In general, of course, they were often – but not always – more confident in handling new tools as well as in criticising them. Experienced interpreters, on the other hand, seemed to be having much less trouble in adapting to the cognitive (over-)load and were – from what they shared in the discussion – quick in adopting strategies like „learn to look away“ or „only look at the tool when in need“. It was really nice to hear the digital non-natives explain to their – sometimes rather sceptical – younger colleagues how these tools could indeed come in very useful.
The different approaches to using CAI in the booth also became quite obvious to me in a recent eye-tracking experiment I had the pleasure of conducting as a co-researcher together with Pavol Šveda at Comenius University in Bratislava. Once again, “learning to look away” appeared to be a key strategy, even more so when you have a running transcript and live translation in front of you rather than just numbers and terminology popping up every now and then. The hundreds of gigabytes of data are of course yet to be analysed …
And to round off my reflexions on intergenerational CAI training, I recently had the pleasure to interview two of the most renowned CAI training experts I know, Bianca Prandi and Francesca Fritelli, for another edition of AIIC’s podcast on AI in interpreting (to be published soon, stay tuned!). From their extensive training experience and research, they confirmed what I had observed in practice: Using live-prompting support while interpreting simultaneously means adding another strategic layer. You need sound simultaneous interpreting strategies deeply ingrained to make optimum use of CAI support in the booth.
Of course, we’re dealing with a lot of clichés here. Nonetheless, that experience makes me even more convinced that it’s a good idea to bring people with different strengths together for CAI or any other kind of training. Using our critical minds and perspectives from different stages of professional life can surely help to make sure that AI supports rather than inhibits us in our work.
About the author:
Anja Rütten has specialised in tech, information and terminology management since the mid-1990s. She holds a professorship in interpreting studies and Computer-Aided Interpreting at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.
Disclaimer:
Views or opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
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