At the beginning of October, I went to Kazakhstan with one of my colleagues from Jinja Honchō, Revd Mitsui, to attend the XXII Meeting of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, and the first meeting of the Forum of Young Religious Leaders. Strictly speaking, Revd Mitsui was attending the meetings, and I was there to interpret for him. This is the third time we have attended these meetings. The first time, I had to provide interpretation. The second time, last year, there were interpreters. This time I had to do the interpretation once again. This means that I will have to go next year as well, because if I am needed and not available, there is a serious problem.
The purpose of the meeting is to promote inter-religious dialogue, something that is particularly important right now. It is also an opportunity for people to meet representatives of other religions, and create informal connections. Jinja Honchō has been sending representatives since the very first Congress, and this time Maulen Ashimbayev, the Chairperson of the Senate of the Republic of Kazakhstan, who heads the Secretariat, mentioned that he remembered seeing Revd Mitsui at previous sessions when he went round to do his initial greetings.
The Congress is run by the government of Kazakhstan, and it has been happening for over twenty years. In the formal meetings, people gather, make prepared speeches, and then endorse a statement that was also prepared in advance. These statements are prepared based on input from the delegates and their organisations, but there seems to be a feeling that the Congress could do better. That was the impetus behind establishing the Forum of Young Religious Leaders, which was held for the first time this year. The Anglican bishop who attends the Congress (Jo Bailey Wells, Bishop for Episcopal Ministry) gave a welcome speech in which she said “You might not want to imitate us too closely, because despite trying hard we have failed to solve any of the problems”. This is good advice, and Mr Ashimbayev said in his closing speech that they planned to experiment with the format of the Forum, to make it more interactive. While I strongly support that idea in principle, the vast number of languages in use makes it practically difficult. It will definitely be a case of trial-and-error.
That is also what we have had to do with my interpretation. Simultaneous interpretation from English to Japanese (which is what I am doing most of the time) is very difficult because of the different structures of the two languages. You cannot translate word-by-word, so you have to wait for a whole sentence, reorganise that into Japanese, and then say it. The speaker is still speaking, of course, and so now you have to try to catch what they are saying, and do the same for that. But because you are doing it one sentence at a time, you cannot pay any attention to how each sentence links to the next — you do not know what the next one is. The end result is Japanese that is difficult to follow. So, this time, Revd Mitsui asked me to summarise instead of trying to interpret everything that was said. That worked a lot better, so we plan to do it the same way next year.
I hope to help Jinja Honchō build on this gathering to create more international links. Watch this space!