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Imagine a translator sitting in a booth, wearing headphones, listening to a Spanish-speaking person and, as she listens, translating the speech into English. Or rather, interpreting the speech. What might we learn about communicating from a person able to do this? Dr. Laura Bertone offers us a wonderful opportunity to find out.

Her doctoral work in linguistics allowed Bertone to follow her intuition that to understand language, she had to approach it from different angles and perspectives. Her broad study went beyond linguistic studies to include experimental work on language production and psycholinguistics, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and, in recent years, general semantics. The integrative result, presented in The Hidden Side of Babel, proves useful not only for simultaneous interpreters; it also provides useful perspectives and tools for personal development in general, and for communicating in particular.

Babel is one of the most esthetically pleasing books Ive ever held in my hands. The quality of the paper, illustrations, font and layout of text add to the pleasure of ingesting the informative content. The Table of Contents gives a sense of the feast to come. Topics include:

The World of Conferences;
What the Interpreter Says
This Side of Words and Beyond Them
The Implicature in the Utterance; The Implicature in Enunciation;
The Hidden Side of Words; The Slippery Notion of Truth in Language
The Interpreter as a Bridge
Divergent or Contradictory Signals
Conscious and Unconscious Acts of Perception and Memory
The Concept of the Whole
What the Interpreter Does
Anticipation and Foresight
Manipulation of Words and Ritual;
The Standpoint of the Interpreter: Personal Responsibility and Ethics
How Simultaneous Interpreting Works: Borrowing from other Disciplines to Explain its Functioning
Chain Reaction: Perception and Memory; Obverse and Reverse
Interference: Interference in Production and Reception; Changing our Viewpoint;
Misinterpreting

The Hidden Side of Babel