Interpreting: Perils of Palaver

Тема: Роль перевода в общении

When aJapanese sucks in his breathand tells aWesterner that "your proposal is very interesting and we will consider it carefully" — meaning, in a word, "no!" — what is the honest interpreter to say?

The answer is that the professional interpreter is duty boundto report the words of the Japanese as faithfully as possible. But according to Gisela Siebourg, who regularly interpreted for Chancellor Kohl of Germany, it would also be legitimate for the interpreter to drawhis or her client¹ asideafter the conversation and explain the complexities of Japanese double-speak.

It would depend on the degree of trust between the client and the interpreter, she said.

This illustrates the need for the interpreter to be takeninto the client's confidence,Siebourg said. It also indicates the qualities required of an interpreter — the discretion of a priest in the confessionaland the mental subtletyof a professional diplomat. Rule number one for the interpreter, she said, is never to repeat outside a meeting what was learned in it.

Siebourg is a president of the International Association of Conference Interpreters — set up in Paris in 1953 with 60 members, and now including 2,200 members — which is holding its triannual assembly here this week.

The association, which has worked since its inceptionto raise the standing ofthe interpreters' calling,thinks a lot about such ethical issues, as well as seeking better working conditions for its members.

The profession is at least as old as the Book of Genesisin which Joseph outwittedhis brothers by, as the book says, speaking "into them by an interpreter." But the modern practice of simultaneous interpretation through headphones dates only from the post-war Nuremberg trials and the formation of the United Nations.

Before that, even in the League of Nations, speakers had to pause at intervals to allow the interpretation — a process known as consecutive interpretation. This is still the method most often used in tete-a-tete conversations.

The method is not suitable for large modern conferences at which several languages are used simultaneously.

Interpreting often is, but ought not to be, confused with translating. The translator has time and a battery of dictionaries at his or her command in order to find the precise word. The interpreter, by contrast,

¹ also "principal".

has to get acrossthe right meaning rather than the exact wording(формулировка) without a second's hesitation. This often requires adeep knowledge of culture as well as language, an ability to understand expressionas well as content.

Diplomats such as former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz of Iraq, who speaks excellent English, often work through interpreters either to conceal precise meaning or to give themselves time to think. In such cases, the interpreter must be careful not to go beyond the speakers' words, even if they make apparently little sense. As Confucius put it, "If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."

Being used as part of a negotiating ployagain points to the need for the interpreter to be taken into the diplomat's confidence. The interpreters association always tells clients that "if you are not prepared to trust an interpreter with confidential information, don't use one." The failure to provide inadvance background information and specialized terminology involved in complex negotiations makes the interpreters' job all the more difficult, Siebourg said.

Several years ago the association — speaking either in English or French, its two working languages — started discussing improved contacts with colleague^ in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe when the East was opening up.One difficulty is that the East European languages often contain no terminology to describe many of the private market terms used in the West.

Russian interpreters also have practice of working from their own language into a foreign language, while most Western interpreters, Siebourg said, prefer to work from a foreign language into their mother tongue.

This avoids the kind of gaffesthat can occur with less than intimate knowledge of a language. When Jimmy Carter visited Warsaw in December 1977, for example, he made the mistake of using a Polish-speaking American as interpreter rather than an English-speaking Pole, Siebourg said.

The result is that the interpreter, a State Department contract employee, spoke about sexual lustrather than desire and rephrased Carter's "when I abandonedthe United States." The embarrassment was long remembered.

Barry James