directed by Rudy Valdez (2023)
presented by U.S. Bank
reviewed by Tania Pineda-Stuart
‘… it’s hard … sometimes I don’t know the word.’
Simple details and characters make a story. The ordinary and the mundane are what make up life and flesh out the reality behind a narrative.
Translators is a short (just under 20 minutes) yet intimate documentary currently streaming online for free. It takes us behind the scenes in the lives of three Latin–American children – ranging in age from 11 to 16 – and their families, who are navigating life as immigrants in the United States.
As is usually the case with immigrant children, they learn the language more quickly than their parents, and as a result become the linguistic bastions and lifelines for families which their parents are working hard to support financially. More than 11 million children in the US currently share the responsibility of interpreting and translating for their parents, and at times also for their wider communities.
With a simple visual style, this slow-paced short film gives you a glimpse into uneventful, mainly happy and at times poignant moments in the daily lives of three real families. Snippets of their lives are depicted through happy scenes with an underlying subliminal poignancy, in which children are being children. Their roles then shift into positions of power, as intermediaries exchanging and managing information that they may themselves lack the maturity to understand or the linguistic proficiency to accurately convey, yet which sometimes has a big impact on their whole families, and at times directly on themselves.
We get to hear the children talk, sharing their vulnerabilities, dreams and fears as they straddle the adult and child worlds in their role as their families’ ‘translators’.
As an interpreter (which is the role the children mainly perform, along with the sight translation that community interpreting also demands at times), you will relate to the challenges they face and empathise with the lack of any support structure or ethical framework within which they work – competency, impartiality and conflict of interest are never questioned.
As a human (and for many of you as a parent and/or someone whose childhood was free of such responsibilities), you will be moved by the children’s innocence and willing acceptance of their position. All three instinctively abide by an internal emotional code of ethics in which their cooperation is the ultimate proof of gratitude and solidarity to parents who have sacrificed all to give them a better life – at the cost of the ‘right’ to a carefree childhood.
The film is presented by U.S. Bank, regarded as relatively ethical in the world of finance, and one would hope change in some form will arise from shedding a light on the issue of unpaid pseudo-interpreters and families who deserve to be better connected – for the sake of the many families involved, and particularly that of the children, who admit that it’s not always easy – as Densel (Guatemalan, 13 years old) says: ‘it’s hard … sometimes I don’t know the word.’
