Intra-family interpretation

May 26, 2018 8:25 AM

Preparing to take my husband home to meet my mother. They have almost no language in common. Tips on effective communication?

So in June my husband and I will spend a week in my home town; he and my mother will be meeting for the first time. His English is pretty minimal; he understands when I use ordinary household expressions, but doesn't follow more involved things and can't really speak at all. My mother can read and write some romanized Japanese but has no practice speaking.
I will do my best to interpret, but are there any tricks to making this go more smoothly for all of us? Helpful stuff: my husband and my mom are both good people who are disposed to want to get along, with no major problem issues other than language. Additional difficulty level: all three of us are introverts, and both of them in particular are good at asking questions to get other people talking, rather than talking at length themselves.
We'll also be spending some time with aunt/cousins and other friends, mostly my mom's friends since mine are scattered all over the country/world, who likewise will not have a common language with my husband. A Japanese lady my mom knows will be able to step in to help occasionally (if, you know, they wanted to talk without having me in the middle), but mostly not.
MeFites of multi-language families, please give me any useful experience you've got! Many thanks.

posted by huimangm to Writing & Language (14 answers total)

Hmmm. I've done this, and in retrospect what I think would have been better would have been to do stuff that wasn't conversation-oriented (as opposed, say, to a family dinner, which is.)

Do either of them like to cook? if they do, that's a nice pastime that people can bond over without much language.

Playing with babies is great family bonding that doesn't require conversation... any chance a cousin has a baby?
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:53 AM on May 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

Google translate?
posted by brujita at 8:57 AM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do they know any common games that don't require a lot of chatter? You can play many card games without much speaking ability at all.

My mom and my grandmother didn't speak the same language, but they cooked a lot together, because it's more doing than speaking -- and my mom could learn the German words for the most common ingredients and kitchen tools in a couple of days.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:00 AM on May 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Games that don't rely on verbal communication much or at all, like Jenga, checkers, chess .. or card games like jacquilynne suggests.

I'm sure you've already thought of this but in a pinch I've used google translate to communicate with people I don't share a language with. I've used it not for complex ideas but more like one word - soap, bathroom, bookstore, etc - where "please can you help me find" is pretty much implied by the situation.

If they have any hobbies or interest in common that could be a nice way to spend time together. Also outings for live music or museums or parks.
posted by bunderful at 9:02 AM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

A bilingual dictionary is what I’ve used in the past when I was in a country whose language I couldn’t speak, and I just used it to construct simple sentences, using fingers to point words to the “foreign” party. I’ve even managed to have an old Hungarian lady laugh heartily when I told her her young she looked. To this day, I can’t speak Hungarian but I know what bájos means.

Let them bond over an English-Japanese dictionary.
posted by Kwadeng at 9:05 AM on May 26, 2018

Don't focus on the language differences; focus on cultural differences. It's very easy to give the wrong impression of yourself if you don't understand that, say, a hand gesture that's fine in the US is very offensive in other countries, or that you should wait for the other person to speak first, or that older people are usually treated a certain way.

This is much more achievable -- there are lots of quick-read books on the subject, especially for the two cultures you mention -- and possibly even more important.

Also: if you load Google translate in a phone and have it ready, it really can be helpful for an occasional phrase or two.
posted by amtho at 9:33 AM on May 26, 2018 [8 favorites]

I think sm1tten is right on in how you should approach it - they both want to communicate and they are already family, so letting them gesticulate and bond together without too much translation interference is the way to go.
posted by annathea at 11:42 AM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

My first thought too was cooking together. Food is a universal language that everyone needs and appreciates and cooking for someone can be seen as a gift.
posted by bendy at 3:03 PM on May 26, 2018

I was on a tour in NZ and one of the other guys was profoundly deaf. He could lip-read some of the time, and a notebook occassionally for complicated things. He didn't use his voice. I remember some beautifully complicated conversations with him, accomplished through mime. For instance, he 'told' me that his mother had had rubella when pregnant with him, and he saw it as god's will. He understood my uncomfortable - "um, I'm agnostic" when he asked about my religious beliefs. We were on kitchen duty, he asked if I was married, and I conveyed that I had been but was now divorced, not widowed and I had two adult kids, and he said that's probably why I was so good at cooking (ha!), and I asked him about his marital status and he told me he was single because he didn't like how the girls in the club smelt of alcohol.

So, how about mime some of the time?
posted by b33j at 4:02 PM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I was the husband in this scenario - I spoke no Viet and my inlaws spoke little English when we first met. Honestly, a little goodwill goes a long way. Teach him a few things like "delicious", and "thank you", I reckon the rest will take care of itself. Trying to force conversation will just make it harder, things like gardening, cooking, as opposed to long dinners can be better. I'm sure it will be great. :)
posted by smoke at 4:10 PM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Don't feel like you or someone else has to be in the room and interpret every single conversation, I found that to be stressful and unnecessary. Try leaving them together in a room and getting some alone time. Your family can work out how to communicate. Pen and paper and access to photos (photo albums, ipads or what not with photos on them) would be good. When my folks visit Japan I think my mom just sidles up to people and shows them stuff on her camera.
posted by sacchan at 5:06 PM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I can’t speak to my mother in-law (or most of my husband’s family) much at all, and to complicate things, she doesn’t even read her own language let alone recognize characters in our alphabet. She also has spent exactly zero time around foreigners so doesn’t even really understand the Arabic words I do speak because she’s not used to listening to Arabic spoken with accents.

Honestly, we spend a lot of time just sitting in companiable silence when there’s no one around who can translate. We can watch Arabic movies with English subtitles and that’s about it. There’s some pantomiming, but the biggest thing you can do is set expectations going in to the situation and let them work out a rudimentary communication system of their own.
posted by scrute at 6:48 PM on May 26, 2018

Best answer: I've done quite a bit of interpreting-for-friends, in some pretty intense visits but not in family situation. Am loving the ideas that have come out above, so this is in addition to those :)

I'm fortunate in that I love interpreting. I'm a super extrovert language-nerd, so this is heaven to me. But I found it super super draining especially in the beginning. So I guess the first thing to note is to keep tabs on how much it's tiring you out, and if you have a chance to practice, or have already done that, it will be better.

One challenge with visits is that people need to build a relationship with each other, and not just address you. The suggestions above are great for mime/simple words/non-conversation ways of doing this. But it's something you could guide a bit when you're interpreting. The most draining moments I've had are when I've been (a) interpreting, (b) also responsible for driving the conversation forward.

I ask my friends to say stuff to each other and then I will interpret - some people are awkward even to do that. If someone asks a question I know the answer to, I will still direct it to the other person and then translate it back, so that there is a communication between them. Lots of people also don't know what to say - if they don't have cultural stuff in common, many people don't know how to take that forward. Things I do to help here - get them to ask questions and lots of it; keep in mind specific topics that might be good to talk about and then suggest to them that they ask each other :)

As you can see I am pretty intense with it. Not everyone is into that, and some people are happy to not understand things. And certainly my main recommendation to you is to take care of yourself. These kinds of visits have lots of stressful elements around logistics and emotions and everything else, let alone the linguistic part. Don't stress if you can't translate everything, or if someone is bored in a conversation, or whatever.

Another thing to keep in mind is what activities your husband will be able to do in your home town more independently - will he be comfortable to go out and about, take transport, go to the shops, do something relaxing, by himself? That will give everyone good time for a pause.

Good on you for doing this. Interpreting conversations between people you love is such a treat, and the most beautiful things can come out.
posted by squishles at 10:42 AM on May 28, 2018

Response by poster: Thank you all for great helpful answers; I've marked some of the most pertinent ones best, but all are appreciated.
Gardening and cooking right out, I'm afraid, since there's no garden and my mom hates to cook (if my dad were alive...). But long city walks are planned, since all three of us love them, and I'm going to send the two of them off to an art museum or two at some point (they're more art people than me). Also we've been talking about playing one of those weird board games...is it Ticket to Ride?...so maybe we can buy an English version there (good practice for him!) and get my mom to play with us.
After that we'll just take it easy and see how it goes, keeping all the good suggestions here in mind.
posted by huimangm at 5:54 AM on May 31, 2018