Vol. 40, April 2004

The Translation E-Buzz

Table of Contents

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FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE - LANGUAGE BARRIER: Everybody’s talking at me

Simultaneous interpreting was pioneered at Nuremberg. It was an astounding innovation, halving the time the war-crimes tribunal would previously have taken. Before then, interpreters waited until speakers had finished before translating. “Simultaneous interpreting is a highly complex cognitive activity that requires the interpreter to simultaneously listen, analyse, comprehend, translate, edit and reproduce a speaker’s utterance in real time,” wrote Barbara Moser Mercer in the academic journal Interpreting. To get some idea how difficult it is, try watching TV and simply repeating what you hear—without even attempting to translate. “During a regular 30-minute turn,” continued Moser Mercer, “working from an original speaker whose speaking speed is between 100 and 130 words per minute, an interpreter processes and delivers final copy of an average of 3,000 to 3,900 words.” That is not much less than this article—and some speakers are much faster.

Interpreting is not mere rote-work. “When you go on mic, you have to assume as much as possible the persona of the person speaking,” says the English interpreter Kenneth Cleary. “If you are translating M. Le Pen, you have to translate his views”—even if you dislike them. A British interpreter was translating Silvio Berlusconi last year when the Italian president compared a German MEP to a concentration-camp guard. “She said she could not believe her ears, but the adrenalin was flowing. She just had to say something. The interpreter must, in a nanosecond, use what could be called nous: ‘Is this man really saying this? Am I going to ruin my career and cause a political incident?’ Can you imagine that stress?”

Olive Rayner, a senior English interpreter who is sitting beside me in the booth, learnt French, German and Latin at grammar school. After further study at Cambridge she applied to the European Commission in 1976. Officially her languages are English, French, Italian, Portuguese and German. She hopes soon to add Spanish. Every so often, in the course of her work, she jots words and phrases in the back of her diary. These have included: “Die Kuh vom Eis bringen” (German for “to get out of a tight spot”), and “fuite en avant” (French for “slippery slope”). She takes me for lunch with a colleague, Alan Rodger, at a nearby restaurant that claims to be Italian—but where the mostly Belgian staff pronounce tagliatelle without the final “e.” Over that dish and others, Rayner and Rodger patiently explain the sheer complexity of the interpreting system in Brussels.

As the EU has 11 official languages, there are 110 different translation combinations (such as English to Danish, Greek to Spanish or German to Finnish). Between them, the three or four people in each translation booth must be familiar with 10 languages other than their own. But with the accession of 10 new countries language combinations will rise to 420. Individuals such as the Portuguese interpreter, originally from Brazil but with an Italian passport, who also speaks Polish—or the British interpreter who speaks French and German as well as Czech, Slovak, Polish and Finnish—are exceptional. In the run-up to Europe’s latest expansion, it was suggested that only a few languages be retained as official—English, French and German. But that solution was never going to be acceptable, as no political leader could tell voters that their language was second-class.

Ideally, interpreters translate only into their mother tongue. But this ideal became impracticable on the accession of Finland, because hardly anybody outside Finland speaks Finnish. A new system was born: Finns interpret out of their mother tongue into a second language (usually English) which is in turn relayed by, say, Portuguese or Greeks. If this works satisfactorily it’s because the Finnish interpreters are a talented bunch, but it necessarily introduced an element of—so to speak—Chinese whispers into proceedings. This can only get worse with the forthcoming expansion, when new interpreters from the incoming countries will routinely be expected to work in the same way.

Perhaps conscious of this, some MEPs believe they will attract more attention if they speak English. This is not necessarily true. “Suppose you have a Greek member who thinks he will be better off speaking English,” says Rodger, stirring his caffe. “A certain number of people in the room will listen to him directly. They may not be convinced because he may not speak well. Others will listen to interpreters making the best of what he is saying—badly—in English. And that will be worse.”

Back in the translation booth, a screen shows a plus sign when interpreters are working directly from the source language. A minus sign indicates that they are interpreting on relay. As if to demonstrate, a Danish schoolgirl addresses a question to Glenys Kinnock while we are watching. Because none of the interpreters in the English booth speak Danish, they listen to another interpreter and relay that translation into English. The result reaches my headset slowly and in a markedly less confident manner than the preceding, direct translation.

It could be worse. Another sign on the screen, a double minus, indicates that the interpreters are on “double relay” (from the source language into another, then another, and finally into the target language). In this situation, speakers using Europe’s more obscure official languages will sometimes—perhaps frequently—come across worse than their mainstream counterparts, sounding less eloquent and less persuasive.

Over time this will surely affect negotiations to their detriment. If the French regret the declining use of their noble tongue, Europe’s smaller nations must almost inevitably feel that their own languages have second-class status. A measure of this is the willingness, or otherwise, of foreign governments to teach citizens the language in question. During the cold war, the British government compelled some of the country’s brightest young talents to study one particular foreign language for the sake of the nation. The writers Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn, the former Bank of England governor Sir Edward George, and numerous actors, diplomats, academics and clerics were, as part of their National Service, intensively trained in Russian. It seems unlikely that anyone is similarly planning, at least for the forseeable future, to create a cadre of interpreters fluent in Maltese.

John-Paul Flintoff is contributing editor of the FT Magazine

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