You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

Interpreter’s Resource Shelf (appeared in RID VIEWS March, 2007, reprinted with permission)
Kathy MacMillan, NIC, M.L.S.

You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. By Deborah Tannen. Harper, 2001. ISBN 0060959622. $13.95.

Of the many aspects of gender diversity, the most crucial for interpreters to understand is the differences in the ways that men and women communicate. Though there have been many books devoted to this topic published in the last ten years, none states its case so clearly as Tannen’s groundbreaking book, originally published in 1990 and available now with a new afterword from the author. Tannen stresses that men and women not only use different conversational strategies, but that they also tend to see different purposes behind the very act of communication: men tend to focus more on managing status and imparting information (“report-talk”), while women use communication to establish and reinforce relationships (“rapport-talk”). With copious examples from her research, Tannen makes a convincing case that male and female styles are so different that conversation between the genders can even be seen as cross-cultural communication. The problem, she stresses, is not with the way men talk, or with the way women talk, but with the unacknowledged difference between the two. Every interpreter who reads this book will surely be able to think of examples not only from his or her own life, but from interpreting situations that unaccountably went wrong. Tannen also points out that the English vocabulary available to describe women’s and men’s actions differ; for example, women “faint”, while men “pass out”. Interpreters of either gender would do well to make themselves aware of these dynamics, especially when interpreting for clients of the opposite gender.

This column appears monthly in VIEWS. Please direct questions, comments, or suggestions for resources to highlight in future issues to Kathy MacMillan at info@kathymacmillan.com.