Impression on Marie Iida's Interpreting

Before reading this article and watching the video, I had never seen a live interpretation. Previously, I had a conversation with someone about the interpreter who worked in our office back at my internship, and all of us, including her, have a background in Chinese. The coworker was born and raised in Hong Kong and therefore knew both English and Chinese fluently but had mentioned once to me that she could never be an interpreter as good as the office's professional interpreter who has gone through training especially for interpreting and translating because of the difficulty of being able to first, listen and retain every single word spoken by the original speaker and then right away, being able to convert that into the second language and convey the meaning and the feeling of what they are trying to say. The only experience I really have in "interpreting" is helping my parents with phone calls, appointments, etc. with my very mediocre Chinese skills so, in my mind, my coworker would probably do a good job interpreting. 

After watching the video and seeing the live interpretation, I know that it is so difficult to grasp each tone, emotion, and meaning that comes from the speaker and convey it to the audience as if you're the one who meant to say what the original speaker said. Marie Iida does a very good job at first, interpreting the English questions to Marie Kondo in Japanese so efficiently without losing words, and then being able to convert Marie Kondo's answers to English so quickly and effortlessly while expressing the same amount of emotion that Marie Kondo puts in her responses. I am very interested in how she says the true joy of being an interpreter is disappearing into the background because it really is as if she does while doing so. You can tell the interviewer in the video is very focused on Marie Kondo instead of Iida even though she is understanding through her. I also admire the fact that she introduces herself by her family name instead of Marie because she wants to be efficient and it really shows her dedication. 

Connie