Reflections of a Psychotherapy Go-between
Shinji Kazue, cross-cultural interpreter

Interview by Stewart Wachs

Translators of poetry know how humbling it can be to try to convey an incommunicable beauty. Yet for nearly half a century in postwar Kyoto, a small and devoted group of Japanese women answered a perhaps more daunting calling. As interpreters for the Aoibashi Family Clinic, they sought to bridge chasms of language and culture in the intensely intimate setting of psychotherapy.

Subtle hues of emotion; undertones of ideas. Implied meanings, oblique allusions — imagine trying to translate all these and more, quickly and daily, while a sufferer’s mental health might hang in the balance. Everything strictly confidential. Western therapists hearing out troubled Japanese, and Japanese counselors plunging into the emotional turmoil of Westerners in Japan, often those floundering in a strained mixed marriage. Working with intercultural couples, an interpreter could find herself one moment the channel between a monolingual spouse and therapist, and the next, between husband and wife, decoding words and feelings otherwise muddled or even unknowable.

For twenty years Shinji Kazue was one of these therapy interpreters. But before meeting her, you must know about Dorothy Dessau, since it was pioneer Dessau who founded this unique clinic — and Dessau, many years later, with whom Shinji Kazue first began to practice her art.

Dorothy Dessau, born into a wealthy New York family in 1900, arrived in Hiroshima in 1947 with the American Occupation, already a veteran social worker trained at Columbia University. In an impoverished country laid waste by war she was responsible for introducing and teaching Western social work practices. After the Occupation ended, Dessau chose to stay on in Kyoto, which had been spared the aerial bombings but not the emotional traumas of war. She became a professor of case work and child development at Doshisha University. She also started to counsel clients privately at her home. Both Japanese and Westerners came, and since Dessau lacked adequate Japanese skills, she began to use interpreters.

Her roster of clients grew, and in the mid-1950s Dessau opened the Aoibashi Family Clinic, not only to meet the mental health needs of individuals but also to provide an environment for the supervised training of Japanese caseworkers and therapists. From the start, Dessau worked to adapt American methods to a wholly different culture. This was the first private therapy clinic in Kyoto, and Dessau, who worked free of charge, paid its staff with her own money — the interest from a trust fund back home — as well as generous monthly subsidies from Dr. Alice Cary of Kyoto Baptist Hospital, who much later also served as the clinic’s unpaid director. For many lean years as Japan rebuilt, clients at Aoibashi paid nothing, or very nominal fees. And likewise, the hardworking corps of Japanese women who served as interpreters, brimming with volunteer spirit, accepted minimal hourly pay.

Shinji Kazue, an English literature graduate of Doshisha Women’s College, excelled there in practical English courses, including interpreting, while also taking English lessons at Kyoto’s YMCA. On a path for post-graduate study at the University of Maryland, Shinji married instead in 1970 and soon began teaching English to high school students at a private language school. While raising a son and daughter she found work translating written texts. Then one June afternoon in 1978 she received a call from a friend asking her to consider working at Aoibashi. “And I told her I had no background in psychology, so how could I do that?” she recalls. But Dessau needed an interpreter who could also do some bookkeeping, and since Shinji had been a certified abacus whiz since early childhood, she was quickly hired. Two years later, Dorothy Dessau passed away at the age of 80, and thereafter Shinji became involved in running the clinic. But she never ceased interpreting in therapy sessions until she left in 1998. Times had changed, and by then a salary conflict was budding among the clinic’s staff that would lead to the closing of its international division in 2000.

Shinji keenly laments that decision and the loss of the clinic’s cross-cultural therapy services. Today Aoibashi is strictly for Japanese clients, and no foreign therapists serve on staff. Since leaving the clinic, Shinji has enjoyed an active career as a freelance interpreter/translator. She also teaches an English reading course focusing on psychology at Ritsumeikan University. Shinji has translated four published books, two about music therapy, and her knowledge of psychology continues to grow. In this interview for KJ’s regular “In Translation” feature, a warm and sincere woman reflects on two decades spent in a singular environment, and era.


What was your first therapy session as an interpreter like? Do you remember?

I remember very well. The client was a woman in her thirties. She’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was obsessed with a fantasy of marrying a man who was impossibly out of her reach. While I was interpreting the telephone rang and Ms. Dessau went out of the room. I was left alone with this client, who was very curious about me and began to ask if I had a family, any children. And naturally I answered her. Then Ms. Dessau came back and asked me what we were talking about. When I told her she got angry and said, “Don’t answer her questions. You’re not a therapist, you’re just a machine that interprets.” That was very upsetting because she hadn’t given me any orientation or instruction about how to do interpreting for her sessions, and no other interpreters had taught me anything either. I felt very nervous and very strange, you know?

And another time . . . well, Japanese clients tended to look me in the eyes, because it’s easier than looking at a foreign therapist who has power and whose actual spoken words you don’t understand. Ms. Dessau told the client not to look at the translator. She said, “She’s just an interpreting machine. Don’t look at her.”

Was this her policy with every client?

Naturally, I followed that rule after what happened, but I never actually spoke about it with the other interpreters. She didn’t like us to talk with each other. We interpreters were based in a very small room in a relatively large, completely Japanese house, different from the current Western-style building that the clinic moved to in 1982. Nevertheless, there was a sense of camaraderie. We were five people, and I was the youngest. The others were much older and had much more experience. We came in to work at different times, since most of them had families. Nobody was full-time. The first thing interpreters did when they came in was the typing, the translating of all the case records the Japanese therapists had to write because Ms. Dessau was supposed to look at all of these and give supervision to therapists. She also did the intake interview for each client and then assigned them to a therapist.

In those days this case record translation took up about one-third of my time, along with session interpreting and bookkeeping. At that time there were no word processors, only the old-time typewriters. I still remember my first day at work when Ms. Dessau came in and said, “Do the translation of this case record” from one of the Japanese staff. I began to translate a few lines by hand with a pencil, using a dictionary. And she came back in five minutes and said, “Give me the translation.” I said, “I need more time.” And she just left the room. I saw another interpreter nearby working very busily on a typewriter and I thought she must be typing from English text. But then I found that she was typing English directly from the Japanese simultaneously, like a machine gun! And I said to myself, “How can I work here?” But if I had given up then I don’t think I would have my present career.

The other thing is, clients come with various psychological problems, some of them very serious. I was still young and had no such experience with myself, friends, family or relatives. That was my first exposure to such a world; everything was new, and it affected me a lot emotionally. The problems I heard in the sessions I thought about when I went home, and I didn’t know how to understand or analyze them. I wrote about my new job to my former college English teacher, now living in California, and she wrote back and said, “Quit the job. It may not be good for your mental health.” I thought maybe she was right, but I had some real interest because I could use English in my work, and I was also very curious about the human psyche. So I thought maybe I should hang on a little longer.

When a particular client would come in for therapy were you regularly assigned to serve them, or would it be whoever was available on that day?

Ms. Dessau tried to maintain continuity, and of course we didn’t want to jump into the middle of a case, so we tried to work according to the schedule of a client. But also we interpreters were always typing up all the different cases randomly, so we knew what was going on in each. In my case, though, with so little background in the field, I had to learn a lot by myself. I studied case records and read books on psychology in both Japanese and English. It was just like being an apprentice, every day getting on-the-job training.
Interpreting in a therapeutic situation, I imagine subtle nuances would be very important.
Yes. To be honest, initially I thought it shouldn’t be done. What I mean is, having an interpreter in a therapy session, it’s impossible to translate directly from one language into another, even if I put exactly one word with another. And in the sessions, Japanese clients usually don’t talk a lot. They are quiet, it’s a cultural difference. Of course it depends; some Japanese clients keep talking and talking, but people who are depressed mostly don’t speak much. And when they do, their words mean a lot of things, so you have to be very careful to express that emotion, but — I was not sure, you know, if the words I chose were right for that situation. And so I had to count on Ms. Dessau or the other foreign therapists to get the feeling directly from the client. And of course they were very good at it, and had some Japanese ability too, so they could understand quite a lot between the translation and their intuition. Even so, it was very difficult to translate for a married couple. After a big fight the night before they wouldn’t want to talk to each other, but the therapist had to push them to speak about what happened, and they finally began to, but only a few words, lots of pauses, and we sometimes couldn’t figure out what had happened.

So beyond getting those facts, you were trying to convey the colors of what someone was feeling.

Yes, and I often felt that such colors were easily “lost in translation,” particularly when I translated from Japanese to English, since English is not my native language. It was most difficult to translate emotions because there are lots of delicate nuances in them, and it is almost impossible for me to precisely feel or understand expressed feelings even in my native language. In particular, I came to see that transference easily happened when I had to translate emotions. (Ed. note: In psychotherapy, transference is the process by which emotions and desires originally associated with one person, such as a parent or sibling, are unconsciously shifted to another person, especially to the therapist.) My translation of emotions would be affected by transference, or by my own psychological state on the given day. Sometimes I also conveyed different nuances to the therapist from the emotions expressed by the client because I was unable to find better English words for them. Part of this problem was solved along with my experience over the years, but it will be a translation challenge forever, because Japanese and English are so different in linguistic structure and in their approach to logic, which often affects the mentality of the speakers.

When we try to express our emotions we’re often on the edge of the unknown, perhaps unsure of what we want to say until we say it, and sometimes unable to quite find the words we so need to express ourselves. As an interpreter, how did you deal with clients who were “on the edge” like this?

I waited until clients found the words or the therapists intervened. We interpreters were not supposed to fill in words or speak for the clients. That’s the therapist’s work. Interpreters should try to interpret in the way that people speak, so they should leave unfinished sentences incomplete, just as the clients found it difficult to express themselves. However, translating from Japanese to English tended to become clearer and more logical because of the linguistic nature of English, which is different from ambiguous Japanese. This means that in using English I necessarily had to fill in words, but as much as possible I tried not to do it. Depending on the case, I might also summarize what a client had said, not interpreting consecutively, and in such cases, yes, I tended to fill in words to make it understandable for the therapist.

When interpreting for Ms. Dessau you were not allowed to speak with clients. But did other therapists allow you to question the client to clear up ambiguities?

In therapy it is particularly important to interpret as literally as possible what is said by the client and therapist. If clients were ambiguous I had to interpret them ambiguously and wait until therapists clarified the meaning, because ambiguities themselves were often the therapeutic issues for the client. Still, sometimes when I just could not translate because I really did not understand the client’s meaning or intention, I told the therapist this and asked the client to clarify. I could do so comfortably when trust had been developed among the participants. Ms. Dessau did not allow me to speak with clients, and this is legitimate, but I just needed to know that rule when I began. Like Ms. Dessau, Japanese therapists did not want interpreters to interact with clients because it can be confusing for clients, and they should understand clearly whom they are working with. Once again, I learned what to do, and not to do, mostly through my hands-on experience.

I cannot say clearly whether interpreters themselves could help clarify what the participants meant for each other, but both clients and therapists had to learn to communicate to their interpreter first, before they could reach each other, which I am sure helped them to express themselves more clearly. However, if Japanese clients took too many pains to be logical and clear they might oversimplify what they wanted to say and lose their identity as speakers of Japanese language. Ideally, interpreting should be done in such a way that speakers could speak as they normally do. The best compliment an interpreter could receive would be if the speakers said they felt as if they had been speaking directly to the other person, not through an interpreter. Reality, however, is not so simple.

When I began interpreting in therapy I was often affected by the dynamics or the strong emotions expressed by the clients, which made it difficult to listen deeply and be fully present. But besides therapy sessions I also interpreted for supervision sessions and seminars and workshops offered by the clinic, and these helped me a lot to understand the many forms of therapy and the work of therapists. I could develop my skills to perform more effectively, and this also contributed to my personal growth.

But at the outset you had doubts about this type of counseling, where the therapist is from one cultural background and the client from another. Clearly at some point you changed your mind.

Yes, fairly soon because, for one thing, Japanese clients kept coming to see Ms. Dessau, and they didn’t want to see another, Japanese therapist. I kept wondering why, since we had them. But Ms. Dessau had a lot more experience. She was very well trained and was excellent at approaching the cases theoretically, analytically and emotionally too. And she used the pauses very effectively: while a translator was interpreting her words, she was thinking of things to say to her client.

So she actually had more reflective time than a therapist would have in a normal setting?

Right. I heard her say that once. I think clients got very good insights from her into the problems they had. Her logical thinking was very refreshing to Japanese people. And I was in the sessions, so I saw and heard this. What she did was based on her training in Freudian psychotherapy. But for mental health matters prior to that, Japanese people used to deal with their family problems among themselves and their relatives, or consult temple priests. They also saw minsei-iin in order to get information about the available social services. The mission of minsei-iin is still today to provide volunteer help to the welfare office in each city ward with its social services, to offer assistance to people in poverty or those who need support or protection. But, you see, in the old days, professional psychological services were almost non-existent in Japan. In Kyoto that all began with Ms. Dessau and her clinic. Her contribution to the development of mental health services in Japan is far greater than most people realize.

When you joined Aoibashi in the late 1970s what kinds of psychological problems did you see the clients and their therapists grappling with?

All kinds. A lot of depression, and family problems. Children who refused to go to school. It was a very big issue even a long time ago. When we had American family therapists come to Kyoto for two years and train the staff, they worked with many families who had children that wouldn’t go to school. And these therapists’ approach was to have the whole family come to the sessions once a month, not just the child alone. Well, in Japan it’s very difficult to have a whole family attend, especially fathers who say, “I’m busy with my work.” But some family therapists will not start the sessions if one person is missing because they see the problem of the child as both representing and affecting the whole pathology of the family. At the same time, in separate appointments, they will also work separately with the child every week as an individual and also with the parents as a couple.

In working on such a case, as an interpreter and as a Japanese, did you ever feel that the therapist made American assumptions about families that did not apply to Japanese?

Yes. These American family therapists had come to Japan for the first time to work with Japanese families and Japanese staff. And they had no choice but to use their own approach, their training in America. They didn’t know much about Japanese families.

But they did read about Japanese society, and they got information from the Japanese staff. They were also supervising the staff’s cases presented at the meetings every week. So they certainly began to learn.
But as for assumptions, they thought that Japanese families could express emotions more verbally to each other, like Americans usually can. One time I remember vividly, a family came to the clinic because of problems with the son who had withdrawn for many years, and his father, mother and sisters were all there. But they kept their mouths shut, even though the therapists pushed them hard to speak.

And so the therapists finally overcame this silence by using one of the approaches of family therapy, which is “sculpting”: using each family member like a statue. Meanwhile, the Japanese staff who were part of this therapy team were watching from behind a one-way mirror. And I was the interpreter.

Well, the therapist decided to have one family member, the mother, be the “sculptor” and direct each individual in her family to take on a shape or form, placing each one where she wanted them. And she put her son and daughters right next to her, on both sides. But she told her husband to go out of the room and shut the door! And that explained everything: how she felt about her family. She wanted to put her husband out of her picture and was unconsciously revealing it without words. And her husband realized for the first time how she felt about him. This is an example of rather successful therapy, after a lot of trial and error.

And I gather that left you as interpreter with little more to do than translate the wife’s directions.

As well as the therapist’s instructions to her, and the other staff’s feedback, yes, but at other times when a client couldn’t speak, the therapist might sit behind him or her and use another technique called “shadowing.” Here the therapist offers a kind of role model of what to say. And I would interpret this. And here too, cultural divides sometimes appeared.

One time a Japanese wife and husband in their late fifties were not communicating with each other, and since the therapists were Americans they had asked the husband to invite his wife to a movie during the week, after the session. A week later they asked him whether he’d taken her out, and he said no. And then the therapists showed how to invite her, what to say, role playing it from behind him. And I felt very awkward, especially one time when the therapist asked the husband to say “I love you” to his wife, which are words most Japanese couples simply don’t use. They don’t say this openly; they take it for granted or think they should feel each other’s emotion. But these American therapists didn’t know that well enough so they immediately asked the husband to say this!

Even if he were going to say it, he would never do so in a group setting.

Of course not! I froze when I had to do that translation!

Understandably. But did you ever, in a moment like this, stop and say to the therapist, “Wait a minute. You’re violating a basic part of the culture here.”

No, no. I wasn’t supposed to do that, even if I felt that way.

You must have been dying to do so.

Yes, many times! (laughter) And of course, after the session I gave the therapists some feedback. Now, as an interpreter, technically I should have just walked out at the end of the session without a word, but in reality it would depend on who the therapist was. Japanese therapists working with Western clients, they think that since we are not professional therapists, but just translators, we should not interfere. But these Americans didn’t care much about that kind of distinction. They tried to learn whatever they could from every source. And while they had to rely on us because they didn’t have much Japanese skill, I’ve observed that Americans are just more inclined to treat people equally. I felt very comfortable working with them, more so than with the Japanese. And so they appreciated my feedback. But this issue also depended upon the interpreter. For instance, I often talked about work with Mrs. Sumiya, an interpreter more experienced than me, and one time when I was telling her how I felt about a case, that the therapist’s comments had not been appropriate, she said, “I’ve never felt that way. I’m always so involved with the translation that it gives me no room to analyze or feel or think.” That’s a difference in character. I guess she would have had less reason to feel offended by Ms. Dessau’s comments about us interpreters just being machines.

So there were different styles and approaches to the interpreting. You felt more than some of the others. Did you ever feel overwhelmed during a session, or have trouble continuing?

In the beginning yes, but gradually I got used to those situations. I learned to deal with the situation effectively and still keep my feelings. And I also experienced two types of therapists in the clinic: those who eventually lost their feelings and those who kept them but could somehow deal with this in their work. And of course that’s why therapists need supervision: they do tend to get overwhelmed with the emotions and need objective observations and direction provided by someone outside of the therapy. So I experienced seeing all different kinds of therapists in the clinic, and in the supervisory meetings I could see the distinctions clearly.

I remember the first interpreting I did for the staff meetings , where therapists talked about their own cases. They called this peer supervision, and every week one person presented his or her case, a case which they had some trouble with, to get some feedback from the rest of the staff. And usually we had a supervisor from the West, from America or England. There was always someone in residence. This kind of supervision was routinely done in the US, but not yet in Japan, and even today we have a long way to go. Anyway, I recall I was in such a meeting with a Western supervisor and supposed to do the interpreting. And of course I was able to speak English on a daily basis, but lots of technical terms came up, and though I knew what they were talking about I still couldn’t put them into proper Japanese terms. The first word I got stuck on was “abuse” — child abuse, or gyakutai. Nowadays it’s used in daily conversation, but thirty years or so ago it was new terminology.

In these staff meetings, seminars and so on, you were translating a variety of speakers in both directions: English to Japanese and then back the other way. It must have been exhausting.

It was a strenuous situation for everybody. The delays often caused problems. At first, I wasn’t fluent enough yet to help them communicate deeply. I’d just pick up the words that I could understand. And going into English, my vocabulary was still limited. With the delays, well, when the Japanese staff didn’t know the answers to their problems they expected their supervisors to offer them some insights, but because the supervisors came to anticipate the translation delays, sometimes they gave therapists simplified answers that didn’t really fit the question. There were also miscommunications, and sentences not fully translated, and I was the only one who actually knew what was going wrong. I felt awful about it and sometimes didn’t want to do this task, but I said to myself, well, this is good training.

How long was it until you began to feel that you were adequately conveying what a speaker wanted to say?

It took me four or five years, during which time I learned a lot of Japanese terminology from the senior interpreters, when observing them interpreting seminars, and also how not to give a literal translation but a summary with all the important ideas well-presented, to cut down on the waiting time and to avoid missing sentences by falling behind. But this is the same as the training for other kinds of interpreters.

Let’s steer back to therapy sessions. What about intercultural couples — one Japanese and one Western spouse? There are so many today. Did you deal with that a lot?

Yes, a lot. What I saw in those sessions exactly reflected the gap between the two different cultures. First they get attracted to each other by the differences, when they don’t know each other’s cultures well. But when they begin to know, then they start to see the problems each side has. And they begin to be annoyed by these. Of course something similar happens with couples of the same nationality, but it’s more striking here.

At first I thought language was a big element, but that’s not necessarily so. The most important problem is personality. Language is often used as an excuse for miscommunication. And it’s again also a matter of Japanese people not being trained to express their feelings well in the words of any language. They just don’t know how. Especially when the husband is Japanese, his wife expects him to be like a Western man, whereas Japanese women can take their role as a Japanese, because that’s the part many foreign men were attracted to initially. By contrast, many Western women who marry Japanese men are not necessarily attracted to the Japanese aspect of them, but love these men in spite of it.

I observed miscommunication not only in intercultural marriages in which we can easily imagine it because of the languages, but also between Japanese couples, who do not express themselves clearly and take it for granted that they are understood without words. Many Japanese people seem to think that what they really feel or think would be lost, and not only in translation, once they say it in words, so they tend to communicate in limited words which leave open many ways to interpret them, just like haiku, which can be read in many different ways depending on the reader. Sometimes I had to step in to clarify the intention and avoid miscommunication, which again I tried not to overdo.

It seems to me that for intercultural couples their issues often come to a head over the decisions they must make regarding their children’s education.

Right, that was a major topic when mixed couples came into the clinic. Which to send children to: international school or Japanese school, or overseas? It depends on how parents want the child’s future to be. Many parents in mixed marriages want their children to learn both cultures and to be bilingual, but I saw many cases where I found a problem in terms of the languages. The child can be bilingual, but I think it’s very important to learn one language thoroughly, which will become the form, like the human body of the person. It affects their entire life. When we think deeply we need the language which is perfect — of course nobody can speak a language perfectly but sometimes when children are educated in both languages they are good in both languages but they are also weak in both, particularly in writing. So I see many parents have difficulty deciding where they want to educate their children, and then the issues of money, all the problems come up. They need to discuss a lot, but sometimes they have difficulty doing that.

And the other problem I saw with mixed couples: I don’t think I have prejudice, but some people who come to Japan and live here for many years, they come with some unresolved problems back home. And naturally the same can be said of many Japanese who go overseas to live. Sometimes they escape from the problems they have here and have a fantasy that these may be solved in other countries. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I saw many foreign clients come to the clinic with unresolved issues, perhaps with their families of origin, or they couldn’t find a good job, and the easy way out used to be to find a job teaching English in Japan. It’s not so easy now, of course. But basically, I saw two types of foreign residents. One is very happy living here. And they can maybe be happy back home too. And the other type is always complaining about Japan, even if they are successful here.

Did you observe healing occur in the therapy sessions you took part in?

Oh yes. Well, the case I talked about earlier, the family that used “sculpting”? Actually the family became healthier and more functional as a unit. So that worked out. Many cases did. But of course it depends: some borderline psychotic cases are very difficult. They need medication and are lucky if they can come to therapy as well as see a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, for medication. And the ideal way is for the therapist and psychiatrist to work together, although these days many psychiatrists —particularly those working in hospitals — either don’t appreciate the benefits of therapy in dealing with personal issues, being so focused on medicines, or simply don’t have the time to work in this way.

The medicines are useful but it concerns me too when people who have serious issues merely take the pills and don’t deal with the issues.

Yes, it’s not a full recovery. One thing I observed in individual sessions was that Japanese clients tended to come into the clinic when their problems were really big, whereas when I looked at foreign clients it was as if many had no problems. I wondered why they were there! And gradually I realized that some were coming for their personal growth, to discover in themselves some potential which they were not aware of. Most Japanese people felt there was some shame in coming to the clinic. They didn’t want friends or others to know. Of course that’s now changing. The media publish so many articles about psychological problems. Mental health is now regarded as a social problem, too, and depression is seen more as a disease, which lessens the shame.

You’ve described “sculpting.” What’s your view of other “non-verbal” therapy techniques that use music, art, clay, and so on? Are these physical approaches that don’t solely rely on a language exchange, until the questioning and feedback, effective in cross-cultural sessions?

Yes, I often found non-verbal therapies effective, especially in couples sessions, for the spouse who has a limited spoken command of their partner’s language. Sand tray therapy, used as part of psychotherapy, seems to be effective in such cases. Clients place and arrange small objects, such as figurines, animals, plants, and furniture in the sand tray to express clearly what is on their mind, on both the conscious and unconscious levels. The therapist then asks questions and also photographs the sand tray for the client’s file. Other forms of art therapy, such as collage and painting, depict the client’s personality, as well as the present state their of mind. Music therapy touches clients directly on many levels including the physical and emotional, and the clients can create their own sounds for communication. On verbal levels it often takes time to get clients involved in therapy, but music has the power to make direct contact immediately and it is non-threatening.

Looking back, what were your perceptions or expectations of therapy at the beginning, and how did they change over the years?

Like most clients who visit a clinic I thought at the beginning that personal problems brought there would be solved by the therapists. But while working there over the years I came to realize that the role of therapists is not solving problems for clients but helping them gain insight into themselves so they can analyze their problems and eventually find ways to solve them by themselves. This began to make more sense to me as I came to have more contacts with therapists; it helped rid me of my illusions and even made me realize that some therapists, who do not seem gifted, or perhaps seemed to lack personal assets for the job, could actually be effective in dealing with some clients whom many other therapists couldn’t handle because of the eccentric nature of the problems. However, I believe that most importantly, genuineness and sincerity are integral assets of effective therapists.

You understandably concentrate on the difficulties of interpreting and translating at a mental health clinic. But could I persuade you to talk about the successes you had in helping clients and their therapists?

My presence in therapy as an interpreter may have helped some clients, because even though I was not a therapist some of the clients may have found me as a person to be in good mental health, which they hoped for. However, I never thought about that while working at the clinic because I was always tackling my job of interpreting accurately and effectively. Sometimes I felt flattered when therapists for whom I did interpreting used me as a kind of sounding board, particularly when they were stuck and feeling overwhelmed by the dynamics in therapy. My view and comments as a third person seemed to have helped them to find breakthroughs. I also felt that my work was appreciated when those who spoke through me said that they felt as if they had been speaking to the other person directly, without an interpreter.

I feel that the role of interpreters is like that of the kuroko, or masked puppeteer, in bunraku. If the kuroko, who are "officially" invisible, clad in black costumes, become too conspicuous, the doll figure will lose its presence. Similarly, interpreters should not be too conspicuous, and should try to have objective views, without making judgments. However, since interpreters are also human beings, they sometimes become emotional, and are affected by the topic or speakers. Since interpreters are in fact not machines I think they should not lose their humanistic qualities.

Personally I often find it difficult to keep myself from objecting to what the person I am translating for says. I know an interpreter who was always frustrated by the nature of the job, which did not allow her to express her opinions; she eventually quit and became a counselor. I felt sympathy with her, but I also felt there were a lot more things I should learn to become a professional interpreter before thinking of changing my career. As I gained more experience I began to find interpreting and translating more challenging and interesting. Nowadays, working freelance I’ve had many opportunities to meet special and unique people I wouldn’t normally meet, such as a Nobel scientist, leaders of new religions and so on, expanding my life experience and perspectives.

Through many years of experience I’ve built up vocabulary and acquired the skills to translate emotions and difficult issues. But improving one’s interpreting skills is a never-ending challenge, just like running a marathon without a goal.

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I am grateful to psychologist Carolyn Turner and KJ intern Kimberlye Kowalczyk for their thoughtful assistance in developing this article. — SW