Interpreters: 'The better you do, the less you're noticed'

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The dimly lit booth tucked into a balcony at the Centro Familiar de Adoración doesn’t hold much: a table and chairs, a pair of microphones, a bottle of water, a few sticky notes stuck to the window, a bilingual Bible and Carmen Epp, listening intently through headphones to the sermon being delivered in Spanish below. Few are aware she’s there, but hundreds of English speakers depend on her ability to listen, interpret and talk at the same time.

Interpreters at Mennonite World Conference Assembly 15. Photo by Lowell Brown for Meetinghouse.

Epp was one of about 125 interpreters who volunteered to translate between Spanish and French, German, English, Portuguese, Nivacle, Guarani and Enlhet on stage, in the booths and at workshops and meetings during the assembly.

“It’s a high calling, but also a humble ministry,” Rebecca Yoder Neufeld says of the demanding job. “The better you do, the less you’re noticed. If you’re doing the job really well you fade into the background.” Yet without it, “all the careful preparation done for this assembly would pretty much come to nothing,” she says.

Yoder Neufeld, a Canadian born in France who’s familiar with all four MWC official languages, coordinated the interpreters for Asunción and the last assembly in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, as well as smaller gatherings in between.

This was the first MWC assembly in memory at which English was not an official platform language, which meant many North Americans and English-speaking Africans and Asians were learning for the first time what it’s like to depend on headsets. A company in neighboring Argentina provided the equipment, and close to 2,400 headsets were dispensed before each session by young volunteers.

But for Yoder Neufeld the job began one and a half years earlier, determining interpretation needs and recruiting and screening interpreters with assistance from Paul Amstutz and Carmen Epp of Paraguay. As indigenous languages coordinator, Jakob Lepp trained volunteers who had never interpreted simultaneously before.—Doreen Martens for Meetinghouse

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