Interpreters to the World

   At a banquet in 1945, marking the end of a Second World War summit meeting in Yalta, Stalin rose to propose a toast://“To those whose work is arduous indeed. We rely on them to convey our every word, so that even tonight, as we relax and enjoy ourselves, they must labor on. Let us drink then to the interpreters.”//

   These days, as leaders of all nations come together more and more often to strengthen ties or resolve differences, international spokesmen rely heavily on expert linguists to transmit – often by simultaneous translation.// Like electricity, a good interpreter is never noticed unless something goes wrong. //The pressure is terrific. One diplomatic interpreter offered a wry description of himself as a man with a ruined liver and worse nerves.

   There are two dozens or so recognized interpreters’ schools in Europe and America. //To be admitted to these schools, an applicant must hold a bachelor’s degree and be as proficient in at least two foreign languages as he is in his own.// He also must be equipped with a razor-sharp mind, split-second reaction, the temperament of a cow and the stamina of a bull, for the two to four-year course covers the whole range of subjects, from art to zoology [zəu'ɔlədʒi].// In the practice class,  the students are bombarded with idioms, clichés, accents, slang and humor of the language, all intended to make them respond automatically without wasting time mulling over mere words.// Interpretation is not a literal translation of the speaker’s words. It is the meaning that counts, as well as the art of conveying its impact.// Delegates listening to an impassioned orator are never surprised to note that the man in the glass booth is thrashing his arms with equal fervor.

   Nearly all interpreters subscribe to foreign periodicals in order to refresh their language capability. Some specialize in highly technical fields and become near-experts.// The sole aim of this endless process of self-education is to put the interpreter on roughly the same cultural level as the man he is translating for. //“We will never be able to perform a heart transplant,” says Miss Danica Seleskovitch, who is in charge of the interpreter’s school at the University of Paris, “but we must certainly master the terminology well enough to explain it.”//

   Most interpreters agree that their really unsettling moments come when the speaker makes a joke involving an untranslatable play on words.// “There is hardly anything people are more sensitive about than the jokes they tell,” Miss Seleskovitch says, “and it is very uncomfortable for everyone when the speaker is overcome with laughter at his own humor and everyone stares at him blankly.” //In an extreme instance, she once solved this problem by quietly informing the delegates, “The speaker has just made a pun which cannot be translated. Please laugh. It would please him very much.” To her enormous relief, they did.//

   It was not until the turn of the 20^th century that the interpreting art came into its own. Previously, exchanges between nations were conducted by career diplomats, and almost always in French.// With the end of the First World War, heads of state and heads of government met face to face at the peace conference in Versailles – and discovered they could communicate only with great difficulty. Conferences that should have ended in hours dragged on for days.//

   Simultaneous translation changed all that. The speaker talks into a microphone linked to a sound-proof(隔音的)booth just off the assembly room floor. There the interpreter speaking into a second microphone translates the speech for the benefit of those who don’t understand the original language, all of whom wear an ear-phone no bigger than a hearing aid.//

   Inside the little booth, however, the atmosphere is invariably charged with tension, and stress is usually most severe in the German booth. Since the verb comes last in a German sentence, there is no way of anticipating what a speaker will say. If the sentence is long and involved, there is no chance of understanding it until many nerve-racking minutes have passed.//

   There are those who believe that the age-old problem of how best to translate the thoughts of men from one language to another will yield to the magic of the electronic age. In 1966, the US National Research Council published its findings on the proficiency of translating machine that took ten years to build and cost £ 8 million. It was, said the report, 21 percent slower than a skilled human.