JET Program Translation and Interpretation Course: Review of 2019-2020 Course
Textbooks for the translation and interpretation course offered by the JET Program.
Just as an early spring vacation started in Japan and I have no classes to teach and therefore too much time on my hands at work, I completed the JET Program Translation and Interpretation Course. I would spend my time studying the books more this month, but now, with the tests out of my way, my motivation is gone. I am moving on to studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) next July. However, while the course is still fresh in my mind, I would like to give my perspective on it for current and future JET participants who may be interested in trying it out.
Please keep in mind that the information in this review may not apply for the next course, as the staff mentioned they were planning on changing the course a bit for the next year. I have no knowledge of what will change, so I can only offer information about what it was like this past year and my own experience of it.
Overview of the course
The course for 2019-2020 had six textbooks with audio CDs to be completed in 24 weeks from mid-October to the beginning of March. After studying each textbook, I had to submit an online test, which involved doing six written translations and six audio recordings of interpretations from Japanese to English and English to Japanese.
In the middle of December, there was a 5-day training in Shiga prefecture, which mainly focused on interpreting skills. It was the most difficult part of the course for me in the brain-power department. That made it the most rewarding.
To sum up the rest of my review, the textbook and online portion of the test were like walking through the shallower part of a swimming pool: slow moving but easy to do. The in-person training was like learning to swim by jumping straight into the deep part of the pool. I will admit something now: I literally never learned to swim, but I can doggy-paddle for a short time and then back-float. Don’t throw me off a boat.
The online course works out if you apply yourself to it.
Keeping up with the textbook lessons was a habit I did not properly form. Each chapter is labeled as a day of study, but I ended up studying in sprints with long breaks of procrastination in between. I discovered when I applied myself to it, I could get through three chapters, or days, of the course work in a couple hours. I wish I made myself do it in smaller chunks consistently. The course textbooks gave me the opportunity for good practice in building skills, but there was no way to measure how well I was doing until I took the tests and got feedback. That only helped my motivation a little.
The textbook had a balanced structure and followed different themes for each week of chapters. Each chapter gave a passage to translate with some of the less common words in a translated glossary. Then it gave a sentence-by-sentence example translation with notes about certain language patterns. Following the translation, there were a few conversations or short speeches on the audio CD to listen to and interpret. I could check my understanding of the audio by reading the transcript and example interpretation of it. Each book contained a few related themes for the translation selections, and a lot of them were structured like news and opinion articles on modern issues. It exposed me to a variety of patterns and words I do not usually encounter in my reading. Overall, there was a lot of useful material to study, spread evenly throughout the textbook.
My thoughts on the textbook-based course? It takes discipline. If you have outstanding motivation and make it a daily habit to work on the textbooks, you can get through all the material on a good schedule. If you do not have a lot of desk time at work, it may be harder to find the time to study, as it was for me. The only external motivators are the tests. These are submitted online, and then graded by someone who gives you points for each question and notes any mistakes you made in your translations or audio recordings and suggestions for what sounds better.
The textbook and online course is not difficult; It is just time-consuming. My tips are to make a daily schedule and habit of studying to get through each textbook before the test submission deadline. Even if your Japanese skills are still not as high as you would like, the final test in each book can be quite easy depending on how much time you put in. I found that rereading the textbook was useful in completing the test and getting a good score each time. Most of the patterns and themes in the test translations and interpretations appear somewhere in the textbook. It becomes a matter of finding the hints throughout the textbook to do well on the tests.
The training course is like an intense exercise program for the brain.
While the textbook portion is easy to do well on if I put in the time, the training course in Shiga prefecture was the most challenging thing for my brain that I have done since coming to Japan. Obviously I need to challenge myself and work my brain more regularly. I built some new muscles that week. I’m serious. After each day of the course, I could feel my brain aching from the strain of concentrating for long periods of time and being overloaded with new information, all of which might be vital for my survival at the end of the week. I was out of practice with this kind of focus after I graduated from my university.
I had no idea what to expect for the in-person training course, so many things came as a surprise. I think I was expecting it to be a bit more like the Skills Development Conference (SDC) I to go to each year for my job where we sit and listen to other assistant teachers give workshops and lectures. Unless I am asked to present or the speaker knows how to get the audience to participate, I may learn some new stuff and take notes, but my brain can take a nap during SDC. The training course put me constantly on my toes. The teacher knew just how to keep us paying attention as she would randomly call on someone to interpret the thing we were listening to into either Japanese or English.
Week of the training course
The first day was check-in, and then a lecture by an established interpreter who introduced the important skills of shadowing, retention, and note-taking. She had us start practicing right away with the person sitting next to us. This lecture gave a small taste of what the rest of the week would be like.
The next three days was daily practice using interpretation skills in smaller classes of about 10-12 people. We stuck with the same classmates and teacher the whole week for every class. The in-class work consisted of constantly being ready to perform suddenly in Japanese or English. We were given lots of practice using note-taking, shadowing, and retention as we practiced consecutive interpreting.
After class was over, which was like finishing a full workday, but way more exhausting than teaching five elementary classes for me, we still had some homework. Luckily it was translating some of the texts we had already listened to in class that day and looking up words that would appear in the next day’s class. I was happy to volunteer to write my translation of a paragraph on the white board the next morning for everyone to evaluate. While translation is a skill I just need to develop a little more on the professional side of things and get real-world experience doing, interpreting is a skill I will have to work very hard at for a long time and gain much more confidence before I can even try doing well.
The fifth and final day was an interpretation symposium. We had to show the skills we had hopefully developed enough from the past three and half days of practice. Six class members created short speeches to present (three of them in English and three in Japanese), and everyone else had roles translating the speeches or asking questions about them, which then also had to be translated. Because I hesitated and was unsure what role I could do well, I let myself be assigned to interpret two speeches. One was in English and I had to interpret it into Japanese, consecutively section by section, on the spot, as the other classmate spoke. The other was Japanese into English. We were given a list of some of the more challenging vocabulary that may appear in the speeches, but other than that, it came down to our knowledge stores and skills in Japanese and English.
The online course can be improved a lot
While the content and practice was very useful in this course, I would like to see more preparation for the in-person training. The textbooks had no relation to the training course besides being additional, unguided practice. Before the December training, I did not know how to use the interpretation section in the textbook. I just listened to the recordings multiple times until I understood every word, then tried putting it into English before checking the transcript and translation in the book. I was very under-prepared for the training conference. I knew nothing about proper note-taking skills for interpreters. I had heard about shadowing before, but never practiced it. There were many new surprises that week.
The textbooks would be better preparation for the training by first teaching the skills that we will need to develop for interpreting. Then we can apply these skills while doing the textbook work. The only guidance in the book was to try translating and interpreting the passages before checking the answers. It did not explain anything about retention, shadowing, note-taking, simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, and other skills for interpreting that showed up in the training conference.
What you can do to prepare
If next time around the textbooks are not made more useful, you can do it yourself. Teach yourself to swim strong and stop doggy-paddling through life. First, do research about interpreting skills. Start with the skills I mentioned previously. Add these to your study habit for the course. Take a little extra time to make your study time more productive and focused on building skills. The point of the course is not to learn about climate change, tax reforms, and shrine thieves (some of the topics in the textbooks), but to learn how to put them into both clear English and Japanese words and sentences. Keep this skill-building focus, and you will be much better prepared for the training course. Good luck JET Program translation and interpretation course participants!