Gender in interpreting: A non-issue?

As we know, this profession has more women than men (a ratio of 3 to 1, I believe). The increased use of webstreaming and webcasting may be a threat for female interpreters, as speakers are mostly men. When a conference is webcast, organizers tend to request gender casting, as they confuse interpreting with dubbing. For their shareholders’ meeting for example, because it is webcast to several countries, they want their CEO (a man) to sound like a man in all languages, and do not want female interpreters. I usually accept to provide male interpreters, if available, when I cannot convince the client otherwise.

However, if a particular prospect asks, for no obvious specific reason, to be “sent” a female interpreter, I usually ask quite bluntly: “and would you like a blond or a brunette?” … They usually get the message ;-)

In Canada, government interpreters are majorily female. Ottawa uses sort of a pool of staff interpreters to cover everything from parliament sessions to jurisprudence to public consultations and spur-of-the moment street interviews---which furthermore are being broadcasted on live television directly from the interpreting booths. It is not abnormal to see a Québec businessman dubbed with a Torontonian Anglophone woman's voice, or a Newfoundland housewife dubbed in a New Brunswick male Francophone voice. It's all about supply and demand and should be solely about the quality of interpretation that the interpreter provides. Gender is merely a surface feature.

This issue has come up in two different ways in my work. Once I was contacted by a colleague to work for a feminist organization, and I requested that the client be asked if they would prefer a woman interpreter. The answer was that they would accept a qualified male, and I took the job. At the end of the meeting the head organizer came to express her appreciation for my work, which she deemed to have been good, but added that she wished she had asked for only women interpreters.

Another time I was working at a large conference of women's organizations and one day was assigned to a working group. The chair of the group came to the booth and requested that the men use feminine forms when interpreting into Spanish (e.g. "nosotras" rather than "nosotros" in sentences such as "We (nosotras) must remain unified"). Again the team was thanked and no mention was made of their gender.

In 30 years of interpreting I have never encountered a situation when a specific request was made for male/female interpreters for male/female speakers, which is not to say that it never happens or won't sometime in my own future. I can see instances in which it might be warranted, such as TV programs for which the producers might prefer gender voice matching (though I used to work on several live TV programs and never heard such a request). Obviously any such request should be made prior to hiring the interpreters so that team composition and distribution of work can be adequately planned.

This is policy at the Franco-German TV network Arte, where with precious few exceptions interpreters will always be cast by gender. Most of the time, each guest on a show will also be assigned one and only one interpreter working live into French and/or German.

...well do I remember, pour la petite histoire, a meeting of European prostitutes (95% women) in the hallowed halls of the European Parliament, where they asked for the team to be all female, only to be told by Franco Prete,our peerless Chief Interpreter, that they would get a normal team, with as many men as the luck of the draw would have it... knowing anyway that our profession too has more women than men :-). TV channels do ask for gender matching, if you ask me because in this too they underestimate their audiences!

I have been asked to set up a team with a male partner when I had to interpret the wedding of Prince Edward live. There were two BBC anchors: a man and a woman and we were asked to intepret depending on who spoke. These situations are very difficult because there is a lag in simultaneous intepretation and your colleague cannot start until you are finished, which meant that we had to rush at the end of each sentence for our voices not to overlap.

On another ocassion, a client of mine (a farm owner) said he wanted a male interpreter because they had to go out into the field, walk long distances in the sun, etc. I did not mind at all. I had been on combines and oil drilling platforms many times before. But I have learned that we are not to argue with clients, sometimes it is only a question of feeling more comfortable with people of the same gender for whatever reason, and we should respect that.