I'm volunteering at a Japanese film festival and the organizer asked me if I would like to help with translation during the Q&A portion of the movie. It will be a Q&A with the Japanese directors and the audience.

In my case, I say yes. However, there is part of me that also says no.

If you were in my situation, do you think you have confidence in your Japanese to be able to do it?

On-the-spot, real-time translation is tough. Some people believe that only people raised natively bilingual can do it - but hey, some people think that about kanji too. My Japanese teacher is a professional court translator, but she was not confident enough to translate live on television for the big US vs Japan game here. A big part of that was the specialized vocabulary - which could be similar in this case, too. Although in your case, people on both sides are likely to be friendly and positive because after all, you're volunteering - if you're the best they've got, they'll be happy to have you even if you struggle or make a few mistakes.

I'd recommend finding and watching some interviews with directors in Japanese - I'm sure there are tons. It should give you a feel for the pace and for whether there are gaps in your vocabulary in this area. If you feel comfortable with the language, and with your public speaking skills, go for it and best of luck!

Maybe you should 'test' yourself with recordings of other Japanese-language Q&A sessions?

Read lots of films reviews as well. Can't hurt.

I wouldn't do it. There's plenty of Japanese people who know English.

Even if there isn't any, the festival should hire professional interpreters, just as common courtesy for a visiting guest so that he or she feels more welcome/actually important.

Isn't it interpretation? Anyway, translation and interpretation are a rare kind of service where clients can't evaluate the quality they get for themselves; that's the reason they need translators/interpreters in the first place. If you don't understand the source language very well and just make things up, they don't notice as long as your translation/interpretation in the target language flows well. Of course, there might be feedback from bilingual listeners etc., but I think anyone who complains about the quality of volunteer work is a jerk unless the festival became total disaster because of your translation. As long as it's above the better-than-nothing level, there's no reason not to say yes, I guess.

If you give the organizers an honest evaluation of your current translation/interpretation/language level and if they still want you to do it, why not?

If you decide to do it, I recommend you watch interviews, similar Q&A sessions and the like in English too (if you do Japanese to English interpretation). The job of a free makeshift translator isn't giving a quality translation. As long as the audience is satisfied, anything is ok. Of course, it'd be better if you can do perfect translation. But if you don't have enough time to hone your translation skills by then, you might want to practice on giving English sentences that sound like good translation, i.e., a skill to make things up so you sound like you're translating what the speaker is saying in Japanese when you run into difficult Japanese beyond your level, obscure technical terms, slang, etc.

The kind of interpretation you're going to do is called タテヨコ in Japanese interpreter jargon. It's arguably the most difficult kind of interpretation, and if it's simultaneous interpretation, they're asking the impossible because you have to translate a word which is not spoken by the speaker yet (For example, the "yet" at the end of the previous sentence should be translated when I was saying "...which is not" because of the word order difference.). Simultaneous タテヨコ translation poses a huge stress on interpreter's brain, so even professional simultaneous interpreters can only do it for 15 minutes or so. Simultaneous interpretation of large international conferences is done by a group of interpreters each of whom does ~15 minutes interpretation and helps the current interpreter by covering difficult portions such as numbers when they're waiting for their turns.

Non-simultaneous interpretation is like a speaker talks about something and then an interpreter says equivalent things in a different language. You might think it's easier than simultaneous interpretation, but actually it's more difficult for amateurs because you have to memorize what the speaker just said. Can you remember word-for-word what a person said for, say, 30 seconds in your mother tongue? A normal person can't do it even for a 5 second long sentence, let alone a minute long reply to an answer in a Q&A session. Turn on your TV, listen to it for 30 seconds, and try to remember the dialogue word-for-word. Or can you recall every word I wrote in this paragraph with an accuracy of 99%? You'd find it humanly impossible. But decent professional interpreters can do it even in their second languages. Actually improving short-term retention skills is the very first step to be an interpreter. Becoming a bilingual might be easier than that.

Now the organizers are asking you to do an incredibly difficult task for free. So I don't think you should worry about the quality as long as you give them your honest evaluation of your skills.

Be honest to the organizers, and be a skilled liar to the audience.

Whoa, no way.

I take 5 minutes to reboot into Japanese mode. Just like a computer rebooting.
Before that I just gaggle.

Thanks for the replies. I've been looking at Q&A samples videos and I say it's doable.

I guess a good start is to start looking at for reviews for the movie online. I think what is especially hard about translating/interpreting for an event like this is the social pressure.

one thing some people do is while the conferencist is speaking, the interpreter writes on paper the key words of the spoken sentence, so that he can connect the dots in between, when translating later.