Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The structure of conference interpreting at the UN and its agencies and at most other international gatherings that can afford it is not now quite as it was at the Nuremberg Trials. The rules invented for that first experiment were that all interpreters should work only into their “native” language (now called their A language, “A” standing for “active”), and that all interpreting should be done from the “original.” With six UN languages currently in operation, that would require six teams of five translators, or thirty people in all, to service a single meeting. The job is now reckoned to be as stressful as the work of air traffic controllers; the eighty-five-minute slots used at Nuremberg have been replaced with a routine of alternating thirty-minute shifts (the Chinese and Arabic booths change over every twenty minutes) through a normal (short) working day—so that in fact you would need sixty people, not thirty, to service an international meeting if the original rules were still applied. There just aren’t sixty people with those high-level and variegated skills that can be gathered at any one time in any one place in the world, not even in New York City. The following schema allows the illusion of seamless language transfer to be achieved with a team of just fourteen members:

In the French booth: two interpreters, one listening in Spanish and English, the other listening in Russian and English, and giving out in French

In the English booth: two interpreters, one listening in French and Russian, the other listening in Spanish and French, and giving out in English

In the Spanish booth: two interpreters, both listening in English and French, and giving out in Spanish

In the Russian booth: two interpreters, both listening in either Spanish or French as well as English, and giving out in Russian

In the Chinese booth: three interpreters working shifts, taking in English and Chinese and giving out in Chinese and English

In the Arabic booth: three interpreters working shifts, taking in French or English and Arabic and giving out in Arabic and English or French

In other words, Chinese gets into Spanish, French, and Russian by relay from the English channel, and Arabic gets into Spanish and Russian by relay either from English or, most often, from French; Spanish and Russian get into Chinese by relay from the English channel, and into Arabic by relay from French. If the Russian interpreter in the English booth has gone to the bathroom, then the Russian channel also gets into English by relay from the French booth; similarly, if the Spanish interpreter in the French booth has a nosebleed, Spanish gets into French by relay from English.

Relay, or double translation, is in principle a bad idea, as the possibility of error is increased, as is the time lag between the delegate’s speech and the output in listeners’ headphones. Also, the fact that Chinese and Arabic interpreters work both into their A language and from it into English is not a good idea—working both ways at once more than doubles the mental stress involved. But the devices of relay (double translation) and retour (one interpreter working in two directions) are godsends for the UN officials whose task is to ensure the smooth running of the meetings. Without relay and retour the whole system would be vastly more expensive—and it’s not exactly cheap as it is.

In the European Union, further refinements are used to ensure that meetings of a body with twenty-four official languages can be coped with. Full symmetrical interpreting under Nuremberg rules—that’s to say, each translation direction being supplied by a single dedicated interpreter—would require a team of 552 interpreters, exceeding by far the number of delegates taking part in any meeting, and that’s clearly not feasible. The system works like this:

When all participants in a meeting understand at least one of the EU’s working languages (English, French, German, and Italian)—and this is nearly always the case—then an asymmetrical language regime is used. “Asymmetry” means that participants may speak in any of the official languages (as long as they let the interpreting service know which one ahead of time), but may listen in only one of the four working languages. Such a meeting would be said to have a “24:4” language regime. If each translation direction were served by a dedicated individual, that would require up to eighty interpreters per session, which is still far too many.