Good talk!
How can coaching-style conversations can help translators and interpreters work through issues and improve their wellbeing? JC Penet explores
We’ve all been there. We’ve got an issue with work, or a decision we need to make when we really don’t know what to do. We’re on a loop. Whichever way we approach the issue, we always seem to go back to square one. It’s as if there is no solution, and yet we’ve got to find a way forward. It’s going round and round in our heads, making it hard to focus on our work. We feel stuck. We feel stressed.
Sound familiar? Well, this is hardly surprising if you work in the language industry. This is, after all, an area where changes have been coming thick and fast. Unrelentingly, even. I hate to mention the A-word, but AI alone has massively disrupted translators’ and interpreters’ work in the last couple of years. For many, adapting to the new landscape means constantly having to make decisions that, slowly but surely, will redefine the nature of their work. Some may even have started asking themselves a far bigger – and scarier – question: ‘Should I stay or should I go?’
It may sound a bit extreme, but it is a real issue facing the whole industry. In the last year alone, a growing number of passionate but increasingly disillusioned translators have publicly posted on social media about their intention to leave the industry. Sadly, many explain their decision as a way to preserve their mental health. This is what can happen when work becomes so stressful and overwhelming that it starts feeling like a toss-up between burning out or throwing in the towel.
Conversations between community members
As an academic whose research focuses on the translation industry, witnessing all this made me wonder how my work could help better support translators and interpreters through these choppy waters. When I became a qualified coach a couple of years ago, though, I started asking myself a slightly different question. What if there were a way to help translators and interpreters be their own solution by helping them support each other more effectively as a community? In other words, what if they could learn to have coaching-style conversations to help one another work through their issues?
For those of you who are not familiar with it, coaching is based on the belief that people are their own experts. They do not need to be fixed, or told what to do. A fundamental principle of coaching is that we are all resourceful individuals and, when it comes to it, most of us know deep within us what we should do about the issues we’re facing. It’s just that, sometimes, the way we feel or think about things can cloud our judgement. When this happens, most of us tend to go down the rabbit hole or avoid our issues altogether.
Coaching can bring you back out of the hole and get you thinking about those issues properly. Through a series of structured, forward-leaning conversations, a coach will help you structure your own thinking and find in yourself the resources you need to achieve your goals. They’ll ask you a series of well-chosen – mostly open – questions, but that’s not all. In fact, a big part of coaching is about empathy. It is about listening carefully to the other person (what they say, how they say it, what they don’t say and what their body says). It’s also important not to be afraid of silence, which can be a caring way to give the other person the space they need to think more deeply about their issues.
A successful way to break the endless loop of doom
You don’t need to be a coach to have a coaching-style conversation. All it takes is some practice in asking the right questions and in deep, empathetic listening. Armed with this idea, I ran a couple of workshops for professional translators on coaching and practising coaching-style conversations hands-on through a series of activities. I ran the first workshop in Cardiff in April, and the second one at Newcastle University in September 2024 as part of the conference on ‘Ethics and Self-Care in Translation’.
The initial, informal feedback from the translators who attended has been extremely positive. Not only did they feel the structure of the coaching-style conversations helped them break free from that familiar endless loop of doom, most also commented on the positive impact these conversations had on their stress levels. Nothing like the feeling of being truly listened to, right? On the back of this, I am now talking with ITI to find a
way to offer these workshops to more members so that, eventually, ITI members can run self-sustained support groups where coaching-style conversations are used as a way to help each other. This is, in fact, part of ITI’s current work to develop up-to-date guidance on ethics and self-care for its members.
Of course, there is no magic bullet. Coaching-style conversations won’t suddenly solve everybody’s problems, and they certainly won’t solve all the industry’s ills. But if they can help you feel a little bit better, and a little bit more in control, then surely that’s got to be a good start, right?
This article first appeared in the November-December 2024 edition of ITI Bulletin.
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