AUSIT Fellow Lia Jaric has been involved with the organisation since the early days, and not long after the NSW Branch was established she volunteered to set up and convene a committee on working conditions. Over the intervening decades, Lia formed long-standing friendships with colleagues. She first met translator Terry Chesher, another AUSIT Fellow, in the 1990s through AUSIT. Since then they’ve worked together on several projects for the NSW Branch Committee and become firm friends, so Terry was an obvious choice to interview Lia.
Translating has always been my favourite activity, and remains so at an advanced age.
Terry: First of all, Lia, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to this interview about your long-serving association with AUSIT.
I’ve prepared some questions about your career in interpreting and translating, but I thought I’d begin by asking you to tell me about your early life and when you came to Australia?
Lia: I was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina and lived in Serbia and Hungary, spoke both languages and went to school in both countries. My parents and grandfather were all multilingual. I picked up some foreign languages as a young girl, and studied Russian and English at school and in courses. World War Two interfered with my schooling and my life in general.
Terry: What were the ‘foreign languages’ you picked up in your early years, in addition to the English and Russian at school?
Lia: German and a little French. I never studied German grammar, but I was able to look after the storeroom in an Apotheke [pharmacy] in Vienna where I worked in 1973, while waiting there for five months for my Australian Permanent Visa. As for French, I only remembered the names of animals later.
After World War Two, both Yugoslavia and Hungary became communist countries, and in 1949 my father, brother, aunty, cousin, grandfather and grandmother migrated to Sydney. I didn’t want to leave then, but I joined them later.
I finished high school in 1952. At that time in socialist Hungary, I wasn’t allowed to apply to study at university for political reasons – namely, I didn’t come from a working-class family, and my relatives lived in a ‘Western’ country (Australia).
After the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 the situation improved. It was then that I was able to continue my studies, and I obtained a degree in economics at the Faculty of Foreign Trade (University of Economics, Budapest, Hungary) in 1970.
Terry: Now, you spoke Serbian, Hungarian – and also Bosnian?
Lia: Yes, but Bosnian wasn’t recognised and listed as a separate language (in Australia or elsewhere) till the Balkan War of 1992 to ’95. My first tests (written and spoken) for the languages of the former Yugoslavia were in Serbo-Croatian, in Hungary in the 1970s. I also sat for the Russian and English languages.
Terry: What set you on a path towards being both an interpreter and a translator?
Lia: It was my love of languages. Translating has always been my favourite activity and remains so at an advanced age.
Terry: What kind of interpreting work were you involved in before you came to Australia?
Lia: I did casual interpreting for the Hungarian Television and was monitoring Serbian press in Budapest for another organisation. At my main workplace (a Hungarian import/export company) I was receiving a 33 per cent language allowance on top of my salary for negotiating contracts in foreign languages, having passed three language tests (including English) at the University of Sciences, Budapest.
I visited Sydney in 1972 on holiday, and returned in 1973 as a migrant. I soon started work as a clerk/typist in the accounts department of a Sydney department store. Later I moved to a textile company, and worked there until there were retrenchments in 1980.
Terry: Tell me about your early T&I work here in Australia. Were you interpreting and translating in many different settings?
Lia: In 1982 I was employed by TIS [the commonwealth’s Telephone Interpreting Service] as a casual interpreter and was told I had to do the NAATI accreditation test within two years, which I did. Casual interpreters worked for both federal and state government departments, migrant centres, unemployment offices, doctors, schools, investigators and lawyers, and later in courts and other settings. This is what I was doing at first. Soon I was asked to also work as a relief telephone interpreter in the Sydney office – there were three shifts, day and night – and I was soon doing translations for them as well.
Casual assignments were not well paid then: $40 for the first two hours, and so-called ‘continuation’ jobs were paid at less than half that rate, irrespective of distances or waiting times between jobs. Interpreting fees remained the same for years, while inflation was rising. We did have the right to reject continuation job offers, but I couldn’t afford to do so.
Terry: When you say you got $40 for the first two hours, just to be sure, this was $40 total, not $40 per hour?
Lia: Yes, a total of $40 for two hours, then around $15 per hour after that.
Terry: And when were you first involved with AUSIT?
Lia: In 1988 I wrote thanking Lou Ginori and Barbara Ulmer, who were the first National President and Secretary respectively, for helping to establish AUSIT. I went to the association’s inaugural meeting in Sydney in 1988 and was one of AUSIT’s foundation members. Once in AUSIT, my outlook broadened to questions of professionalism and the need for constant development, even in the technological sense. I wanted to be as good a professional as I could, and to contribute to the profession as well. In no small way, it was a very good feeling to belong and have a representative body.
Terry: Would you like to say more about your interest in improving working conditions? I know you worked tirelessly over many years on working conditions and ethics, as well as promoting AUSIT and the profession.
Lia: Working condition issues and low pay brought me to AUSIT in the first place. The NSW Branch Committee was relatively active and successful in other fields, but the issues around pay and working conditions for interpreters had been dragging on for a long time with minimal improvements. The problem remained that indexation was never applied to interpreters’ fees, and it took years to get an increase, while public service pay rates were regularly adjusted.
That is why I started AUSIT’s Working Conditions Committee. There were five of us, including Teresa Lee, Lenita North and Sayed Kandil, who regularly met to do fact-finding work. The first issues we looked at were registration of professional interpreters, information on fees and conditions, and the need to approach government services about desirable changes to fee structures.
Terry: In your Working Conditions Committee reports published in the AUSIT NSW newsletters of May and June 1998 you said: ‘Apart from looking at the present fees and conditions … and how to improve them, we are now facing the problem of how to stand up for ourselves where our basic work, our livelihood is threatened, and where attempts are made to downgrade the requirements for qualified interpreters and translators’.
Lia: Yes, at that time the so-called ‘mileage’ fee (paid for using private transport) was abandoned. Also, interpreters with lower NAATI qualifications were engaged by some government agencies. At this stage, a Translator Subcommittee was also formed.
We prepared a report on federal award fees, recommending that AUSIT’s National Council approach the federal government to press for improvements. To prove how badly we were being treated, I obtained the inflation statistics going back a few years from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and compiled a table which compared the CPI rise to the almost stagnant fees interpreters were being paid by a federal government department. This showed how much our income was lagging.
Our work was reviewed by the NSW Branch Committee, and we continued to collect evidence of problems and unfair treatment, and to lobby employers, particularly government T&I services. Some private language service agencies that I worked for paid better than the government. Sandra (now Professor) Hale, one of our prominent AUSIT members, was interested in what our work on the Working Conditions Committee was all about.
Can you give me some examples of problems and unfair treatment from your own experience?
Terry: You can take credit for a number of successes contributing to the overall (and inevitably slow) improvement of conditions for the profession. Can you give me some examples of problems and unfair treatment from your own experience?
Lia: One example of bad working conditions I’d like to mention involved a collision with an interpreting service’s coordinating administrator. I was assigned two jobs for that day, payable in one fee amount. When held up waiting for a doctor in the first job, I reported by phone that I would be late at the second, which was in quite another place. The administrator said to me, ‘If you’re late for the second job, you won’t be paid for either of your assignments’. I resigned the next day.
Another example was when I was kept longer than the booking time, interpreting for a social worker in a rather tragic case. I phoned the office asking for a time extension, but they said no. Under the circumstances it was impossible to leave the non-English-speaking client.
The ethics of our profession could also be tricky to navigate in those early years. I did court interpreting from about 1985. When I was left alone with clients who were not entitled to free legal representation (for example, in traffic matters), they often asked me for legal advice – which, of course, I was neither able nor ethically allowed to give. One thing that I realised I could do, though, was this: when given a relevant document to sight translate, I would deliver it in a particularly careful and clear way, to help ensure that the client could pick out the important details therein.
Another area of great concern was when police would require an interpreter to sight translate a police caution. Because of the legal language used, cautions can be unintelligible even for native English speakers – so as you can imagine, it’s difficult for an interpreter to convey the content to their clients. Linguist Professor John Gibbons conducted and published a review of the linguistic difficulties involved [which you can read about here].
After a couple of years of lobbying, we did achieve some improvements in working conditions. For example, court interpreters were routinely offered a chair (instead of standing for hours next to the witness box!) and a glass of water. AUSIT also started negotiating early on with the legal profession about linguistic issues, such as wrong instructions to interpreters – for example, ‘Just translate word for word’.
Terry: What other roles did you take on within AUSIT?
Lia: For some years I was on the NSW Branch Committee as treasurer, which meant keeping lists of members’ names up to date, collecting and banking membership fees (which in those days were paid by cheque, so I had to take batches of cheques to my local bank branch and pay them in), and then reporting to the NSW AGM.
I travelled to Adelaide for an AUSIT National AGM, and to Brisbane for an AUSIT Conference. I also took part in the National Conference in August 1999 (held at the Gazebo Hotel in Potts Point, Sydney), of which I have a photo. [see below]
AUSIT National Conference, Sydney, August 1999: Lia (right of centre) with (to her left) Louise Dyer, then the late Vince Danilo (in tan jacket and dark tie); AUSIT’s first National President Lou Ginori (closest to the camera); and Nick Galanos (standing at the microphone)
Terry: From 1998 to ’99 we worked together on an online international survey of interpreters working in the community. Along with Vadim Doubine, Rosy Lazzari and Helen Slatyer, we were members of an international committee on community interpreting that had been set up by FIT (Féderation Internationale des Traducteurs / the International Federation of Translators) following the FIT Congress that AUSIT hosted in Melbourne in 1996. We surveyed community-based interpreters using a questionnaire which we circulated to local and international interpreters through FIT’s networks.
Lia: Yes, we were working with the other committee members, collating the results in our own time, in one of our homes. I remember Helen Slatyer guiding us on how to go about this, as we had no experience in data processing. We compiled the results based on information in the questionnaires, which were returned by almost 100 interpreters from seven countries.
An interim report on our survey was presented to the FIT Congress in Mons, Belgium in 1999, and a further paper, presented at The Critical Link 3 conference in Montreal, Canada in 2001 – which had a focus on interpreting in legal, health and social service settings – was later published in a volume of selected papers from the conference.* Our findings confirmed the complexity inherent in community-based interpreting.
Lia (left) and Terry at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, on International Translation Day (the Feast of Saint Jerome) in 2012
Terry: Would you like to talk about any other significant events in your T&I career?
Lia: In the mid-1990s refugees were arriving from Bosnia, from the war there, and there was a shortage of qualified interpreters. First, I gained NAATI Recognition, then I sat the NAATI test for the Bosnian language.
It was often hard to adhere to the AUSIT Code of Ethics when faced with the levels of human suffering and special needs that I was encountering with these newly arrived refugees, but I was able to work with many of them.
In 1998 I was nominated for an AUSIT Fellowship. When presented with the certificate I wouldn’t agree to having my photo published in the AUSIT Newsletter – don’t ask me why!
Terry: And my last question: what have you enjoyed about being an AUSIT member?
Lia: I have enjoyed the company of intelligent colleagues, working for the community, and the progress we slowly made for the profession.
Terry: I’ve really enjoyed our interview, Lia. Thank you very much for your time.
* Chesher T, Slatyer H, Doubine V, Jaric L & Lazzari R (2003). Community-Based Interpreting: The Interpreters’ Perspective. In: Brunette L, Bastin GL, Hemlin I & Clarke H (eds), the Critical Link 3: Interpreters in the Community, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 273–292.
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