I’ve made more mistakes as an interpreter than I can count.

I do everything in my power to avoid making mistakes, but when you’re interpreting highly technical material at speeds in excess of 200 words per minute, a few glitches are bound to happen.

You’re probably hoping to get a few examples, aren’t you? Okay, here are a few.

Example #1: Lexical error caused by failure to understand the word in the source language.

About six months after I first started interpreting professionally, I was interpreting a college geology class from English into American Sign Language (ASL). The professor described a certain rock as being — I heard the word “nice.” Well, okay, the rock was nice. So that’s how I signed it. “Nice rock.”

It hit me several minutes later. The mineral was “gneiss.” Oops.

Example #2: Lexical error caused by failure to produce the word correctly in the target language.

Many years later, at a time when I had far too much experience to make a rookie error like the one I’m about to describe, I was interpreting a law school class in which a metal something-or-other was significant to the resolution of the lawsuit. I had a complete brain freeze and signed “glass” instead of “metal.” Several times.

There’s nothing quite like messing up a simple vocabulary item in front of a client. Several times.

My deaf client finally got tired of watching me make the same bonehead mistake over and over again, and fed me the correct sign. I went into an “omigosh I’m an idiot” meltdown and cracked myself up. I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t continue interpreting. I had to leave the room, while my team interpreter finished the class on her own.

Example #3: I never did figure this one out.

I was interpreting a postgraduate physics class for a professor who had a thick foreign accent in a room with the world’s worst acoustics. A word I heard as “tree” kept coming up. I signed the word as “tree” several times.

When the interpreter I was teamed with took over on the hotseat, I noticed that my colleague was signing the same word as “three.”

I decided the best course of action was to consult with an expert and find out what the word actually was, so I slipped my deaf client a note. “There’s a word that I’ve been interpreting as ‘tree’ and P___ has been interpreting as ‘three.’ Which is it?”

My deaf client responded, “I don’t know, but neither of those is correct.”

Postscript:

Here is some nice gneiss.