Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The difficulty is not only high-speed language transfer. The difficulty is that the sound of your own voice diminishes your ability to hear what the other person is saying. That’s why we take turns in conversation and speak over someone else only when we really do not want to hear what he has to say. A simultaneous interpreter must learn to overrule the natural tendency not to listen when talking, and not to talk when listening. Simultaneous interpreting exists only because some very adept people can train themselves to do such an unnatural thing. Try it yourself: switch on a TV news broadcast and repeat at your own normal speaking volume exactly what the newscaster says. If you can keep that up without losing a sentence for ten minutes or more, then maybe you, too, could be a simultaneous interpreter—provided you know another two languages extremely well. Millions of people know three languages well enough to be interpreters, but only a small proportion of them can manage the exhausting trick of dividing attention between what you are saying and what you are hearing—without missing a word.

The trickiest part of high-speed language transfer is that politicians and diplomats do not characteristically use short, simple sentences without subordinate clauses, or leave long gaps between them. They tend to drone on with sausagelike strings of evasive circumlocutions: “I am instructed by my ambassador to inform this august assembly that contrary to rumors reported in one of the organs of the capitalist press no authorized agent of the state has knowingly exported to any other country any materials covered by the international convention on …” Unfortunately, there is no convention on the export of long-windedness, and so interpreters have to begin reformulating sentences of this kind without knowing for sure where they will go, what their real point is, or what alteration to the structure of the starting point the end of the sentence will bring. Extremely sophisticated mental skills are required to “hold” features of meaning in provisional formulations until the real topic of the sentence is finally let out of the bag. An interpreter who has to repair a sentence after it has begun (as we all do in normal speech) loses valuable time. The ability to pick the right formulae in a flash and to keep the sentence loose enough to cope with what may crop up next is acquired by experience and practice—together with an uncommonly developed capacity for finding instant matches between sentence patterns that are grammatically and stylistically far apart.

Most of the people involved in preparing the Nuremberg Trials doubted this newfangled setup would work. We owe the modern world of conference interpreting more to the can-do attitude of the victorious U.S. Army than to the considered judgment of prosecutors, judges, and language professionals. Chief doubter among them was Richard Sonnenfeldt, the head of the U.S. prosecution team’s translation service. He’d been picked from a motor pool in Salzburg by General “Wild Bill” Donovan to serve as translator in the long interrogations of the defendants that preceded the trials. He’d interrogated the Nazi top brass on behalf of four-star generals and was asked to take charge of the simultaneous-interpreting team during the trials. Sonnenfeldt turned the job down because he was intimidated by the speed requirement and by his own lack of familiarity with legal terminology. But the main reason he backed off from running the world’s first simultaneous-interpreting service was his professional opinion that either the people or the system, or both, would break down.[152]

He was right about the glitches. Microphones and headsets went on the blink; lawyers and witnesses (including the chief U.S. attorney, Robert H. Jackson) spoke too fast; on more than one occasion, an interpreter burst into tears on hearing testimony from Rudolf Höss, the ice-cold commandant of Auschwitz. But, despite the obstacles, the system worked. Hermann Göring is said to have remarked to Stefan Hörn, one of the court translators, “Your system is very efficient, but it will also shorten my life!”[153]