Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The speech-translation system inaugurated at the Nuremberg Trials launched a new era in international communication. The interpreters’ achievements not only created a new skill and a new profession but had an immediate and far-reaching effect on world affairs. First of all, every new international agency wanted a simultaneous-translation system straightaway and thought it could just be bought at the store. In February 1946, when the Nuremberg speech-translation system was barely run in, the first General Assembly of the newborn United Nations Organization adopted as its second resolution that “speeches made in any of the six languages of the Security Council shall be interpreted into the other five languages.”[154] Thereafter all the dependent agencies—from the International Labour Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization, from UNESCO to the World Bank—acquired the equipment and sought to recruit the personnel to produce the magical illusion that every delegate would always be able to understand what any other delegate was saying as he or she was in the process of saying it.

This led outsiders to take for granted that the diversity of languages was no longer an impediment to collective international action and world harmony. Insiders—diplomats and negotiators in all the new bodies set up by the UN—were under no such illusion. As one student of international law points out, texts and speeches produced in multilingual form at high speed may be grammatically correct, but they are never quite coherent. The small deviations that arise, over which delegates argue for hours on end, “intensify the collective awareness of the importance of translation.”[155] But the early years of simultaneous interpreting were also years of great hope for a new world order ruled by “jaw-jaw” in place of the preceding decades of “war-war.” In those circumstances, the general public easily forgot just what a fragile and mysterious feat was being accomplished by a very small group of language gymnasts in the glass boxes in the rear of the assembly hall.

It hardly needs explaining why simultaneity in translation is an illusion. You cannot translate anything until you have heard what it is: translation is always a “speaking after.” The impression of simultaneity is created by a bag of impressive language tricks. First, many speeches are read out from a prepared text. Diplomats sometimes provide the translation teams with the text in advance of the meeting—often only just in advance, but even a few minutes’ head start takes away a lot of stress. Second, international meetings are dominated by speeches of a fairly predictable kind. Once you acquire experience of the kind of business being conducted and of the formulaic language it uses, you can run ahead of what is actually said and give yourself a little brain space to listen for the all-important variations that the speaker might introduce. Contraction and change of orientation are also used for nonformulaic digressions: “The Soviet delegate has just made a joke” can replace the telling of a long Russian shaggy-dog tale. But, even so, the skill of the “conference interpreter” (the term that has come to replace oral translator, simultaneous translator, and speech translator) calls for high levels of concentration and mental agility. There are few people who can do it at all, and even fewer who want to do it day in and day out.

Sixty years of experience have not made it any easier to predict whether an individual can be turned into a conference interpreter or not. Even now, between half and three quarters of all students admitted to interpreter training courses fail to enter the profession.[156] At the beginning, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the disastrous history of the twentieth century had produced many thousands of people with outstanding language skills in several of the six official international languages (Spanish, English, French, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic)—children of refugees from the Russian Revolution brought up in Shanghai and educated at the Lycée Français, where they learned English, young refugees from German-occupied France who had spent months or years in Cuba or Mexico awaiting a U.S. visa before going to college in New York, and so on. The first generation of the elite of the translating professions consisted mostly of young people from backgrounds of that kind, who remained in post for thirty years and more. These founding mothers and fathers of the conference-interpreting community have now retired, and it has proved difficult to replace them. The lack of personnel is particularly acute for the two most-needed languages in world affairs today—Arabic and Chinese. Even the Russian- and French-into-English booths are getting harder to fill.