21st Century
Dharma Bum
by Brian Van der Horst
Translating NLP for The
French: Part Two.
By this time I had begun to learn a lot
more useful French than I had ever picked up in school. I was learning by
listening to my interpreters. There are two ways to get translated if you are
not fluent in your host country's language.
Simultaneous and Sequential translation. With simultaneous, you have someone talking over your words. Normally this is done from a translators'
booth, and the audience receives their own language over headphones. This is the way they do it at the United
Nations, or in major companies.
Sequential translation is
more appropriate to teaching NLP. It works like this. You are a trainer in front of your group. You have just imparted
some morsel of timeless wisdom. You pause, while your translator takes over.
Whatever comes out of your mouth gets translated. At this moment, you are trying to think of what you are going to
say next. Your consciousness is not on
the foreign language at this instant, and your own words-coming back translated
to you-have a chance of sinking in your own subconscious.
Sequential
translation is a great way to learn a language.
As you get more competent
in the foreign language, your concerns multiply. First, you have to know what you are going to say well enough to
be able to chunk and time it appropriately for a foreign audience. This means you have to know when to start,
when to stop to give the interpreter time to translate, and how to pick up the
thread.
So you have to calibrate
your translator for understanding, and overwhelm. If you give him too many words, he can't remember what you've
said. And he'll be forced to summarize. If he doesn't understand the nifty jargon
you have just introduced, worse-he'll have to improvise.
Then there is the structure of different languages. If you give your translator too few words,
he won't be able to translate. English
is a transformative language. One word
at the beginning of a phrase will change the whole sentence. French is a adjunctive language. Often you don't know the meaning of the
sentence till you hear the last word. In the beginning, my translators would
say, "Go on..." Instead of translating, because of the syntax of French,
they would have to start from the end instead of what I thought in English was
the beginning of the thought.
So to be more effective, I
would start to think how I could construct my sentences in English so that they
could be translated more easily to French.
This is also a matter of time management. French is a third redundant
over English. It takes 33% more time to
say what you want to say in French than it takes to say in English. So to teach
a 24-day practitioner in the time I'm used to taking, I have to remember that everything
I say-and all the responses I'm going to have translated from my students-is
going to take twice the time to do, plus 33%!
What a wonderful
opportunity to learn economy, elegance and discretion.
But the duties of a NLP
Trainer being translated do not stop there.
I also have to calibrate the group, to see if they are following,
understanding, and learning. I have to
manage the behavior of my translator so that he is demonstrating what I am
demonstrating. I have to be vigilant
over the criterial choices of my translator.
 Here's Brian on Exam Day
Like any other human being,
he or she will use their own criteria and anchors for important concepts.
I am in front of a group
trying to get across experiences and distinctions that are difficult enough for
the uninitiated to grasp in English. I
start talking about "acknowledging" people for their contributions to
your life.
The word doesn't exist in
French. The nearest things are concepts
like being aware, giving credit, and being grateful. I have burned out many
translators because I would make them go through a list of synonyms until I
found the closest equivalent in the French context. Naturally, some of these
people feel real put out that I don't accept their definition for a word.
I can't accept their
definition until I know they have really had the experience. Many times in France, I have had to stop and
give my translators an experience before they could begin to help me find
expressions which would shift a student's world view.
Then too, I have to be
careful of my anchors, the translator's anchors, visual, spatial, tonal and
digital; and then try to give the kind of multi-level, overlapping realities
type of teaching that creates good NLP students.
Yup, if you can understand
enough of the language that you are being translated to, there are a lot of
balls to keep in the air at the same time.
If you are ignorant, it's easier.
But you'll end up calibrating weird things in your audience instead of
understanding.
Fortunately, after the
first two years, three of my translators were master practitioners.
The first thing I noticed
about the French was that despite how incredibly kinaesthetic they are as a
culture, they don't have a word for emotions like we do. They use the English word
"Feeling" because their choices are limited to sentiments, emotions,
and desires.
If you are searching for a
particular connotation in English for French, I've found one of the easiest
ways is just to go through your own list of synonyms in English. One or two of the words you find in your own
personal thesaurus is bound to be French.
The job of being translated
simultaneously, thinking of seven logical levels at the same time while
teaching through someone who was translating my words with their own criteria
was not my most fascinating problem.
I was having these
difficulties getting some of the basic NLP presuppositions across to the
French. In California, it was easy to
suggest that there is a difference between behavior and self. One does dumb things from time to time, but
that doesn't necessarily mean you are a
dummy. You have your emotions, you get happy or sad from time to time, but
emotional choice is possible.
Then I began to look at the linguistic environment of the
French. They have this tense, called
the subjunctive that is especially made to indicate that emotions are the
"unreal tense." It is used to
indicate that emotions exist outside of human beings, and then act, like a
cause, on people who have behaviors, like the effect. Nice, huh?
I had to produce some new
experiences in my French audiences before they would even consider separating
behavior from self. One of the best
examples I found is wetting your pants.
My students would say,
well, if you have a kinaesthetic stimulus, you have to act on it, right? Emotions move you. If that were true, I would say, then we would all be wearing
diapers. It is a very natural,
kinaesthetic signal to want to pee in your pants. But we have all learned to do differently, at choice.
It is even difficult to
talk about possibility in French. There
are approximately twice as many modal operators of necessity and half the modal
ops of possibility in French than in English.
Of course, in terms of
translating NLP into French, there is also the whole non-verbal spectrum to
consider. Our hand signals for
"OK" and "thumbs up,"
mean "zero" and "one beer!" to the French. Their tonal expressions for bored sound like
ours for vomiting.
Even animal sounds are different. These
are the sounds the same animals make in different languages:
Animal French English
cow meuh moo
rooster cocorico cock-a-doodle-doo
duck coing-coing quack
dog ouah-ouah woof
sheep beuh baah
pig hompf oink
For the past 18 years, I
have spoken French well enough to lead my seminars without a translator. Even though I still have a terribly American
accent, and some of my constructions need to be re-worded two or three times
until I hit the right combination, the students are satisfied. But even today,
I would not dare to teach hypnosis is French-there are too many fine shadings
and layered resonances that I still have not mastered.
I could go on and on about
the differences between French and English, but if even the animals don't speak
a universal language-don't expect your high school language lessons to be much
help. If you are going overseas, think about getting a good translator if you
aren't fluent in the contemporary use of the language of your target
country. NLP is too important, and too
precious a tool for the evolution of humankind to do a half-cocked-or is that
cocorico?-job of getting the message through.
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