Australia, 1959. A man, a refugee from Bulgaria, goes to a hardware store with his daughter to buy nails. However, this man knows no word of English. He pushes his daughter then to ask the big man behind the counter for nails. The big man is towering over her and annoyed because he can see her father is one of those "bloody reffos who don't know the lingo". She picks up the courage to say her father wants nails. The big man asks her what type of nails does he want? She interprets; her father wants nails for building things. The big man then asks if her father wants roofing nails and whether they need to be smooth shank, twist shank or sealed umbrella-style? She panics as she has no idea what those words mean, let alone be able to interpret them.
How could she know? She was only 6 years old.
That refugee man was my grandfather and his daughter was my mother.
My mother and many others whose parents can't speak the local language were/are forced into being child interpreters, usually dealing with complex and stressful situations: consulting a doctor about a parent's health condition, dealing with admin clerks, reading and translating official letters, having to argue with an underpaying employer...
These children are expected to know everything in both their languages while facing intimidating adult strangers.
As a child, how would you have handled these situations?
How much would you have understood what was being talked about, let alone then be able to convey those big adult words into another language?
This is still the reality for many bilingual and multilingual children of migrants and refugees, with the pressure on them to perform way beyond their capacities often leaving them traumatised.
My mother has had a lifelong, near-paralysing fear of accountants, after as a child being the unwilling interpreter in the heated arguments between her parents and their accountant.
In this age of instant machine translation and accessible interpreting services, you'd think that this burden on children would be a thing of the past... but it still happens, and far too often.
What is different though is that recently there's finally been acknowledgement of this issue, concern for the short- and long-term wellbeing of these children, awareness of the dangers of misinterpretation, and discussions on solutions to these issues and measures to prevent them. Knowing that they're not alone is a comfort for these children, as it was for my mother, whose friends, mainly migrants and refugees, were also having to interpret for their parents and grandparents.
For an idea of what it's like to be a child interpreter, check out this interview with Olivia Abtahi, the author of the newly released picture book The Interpreter, which provides a simple yet direct insight into the life, obligations and trauma of a child interpreter.
Never should children be burdened like this. They deserve a childhood.
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