Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi’s rambling, 95-minute speech at the United Nations in 2009 got a lot of press. Less well publicized was the effect on his interpreter. According to the New York Post, Qaddafi’s personal interpreter – whom Qaddafi insisted on using instead of the official UN Arabic interpreters – collapsed 75 minutes into the speech, saying "I just can’t take it anymore."
This episode was unusual; most speeches are prepared beforehand and interpreters spell each other if a speech runs for longer than a specified time. Nevertheless, political interpretation can be a grueling business. No nodding off during boring speeches or losing focus during lengthy negotiations. An error may not just be confusing or embarrassing, but can have major repercussions.
Affecting relations between nations One story that made the rounds for some time as an example of embarrassing political translation was about John F. Kennedy. In a speech at the Berlin Wall in 1963, he famously declared "Ich bin ein Berliner." According to the story, Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner." Adding the "ein" meant that the statement translated roughly as "I am a jelly doughnut" – a Berliner being a type of pastry. The interpreter who coached Kennedy in the statement, it was said, made a mistake. This story has since been widely debunked, but, even if it were true, it would hardly be the worst example of interpreter error.
In 2007, tensions rose in the Middle East, when a Syrian representative to the UN reportedly told a General Assembly committee that Israel had attacked a Syrian nuclear facility – a facility that Syria had been denying was a nuclear facility. The statement made headlines in the Middle East, where there were already concerns about Syria’s nuclear ambitions. The UN later determined that the Syrian representative never used the word "nuclear." It was an error, not by the Arabic interpreter who was interpreting into French, but by another interpreter who was translating the French into English. The UN subsequently punished the interpreter for the mistake.
The next year, an interpreter error caused a diplomatic flap between Australia and Indonesia. At that time, Australia had a travel warning in effect about Indonesia, where over 100 Australians had been killed in bombings in 2002 and 2005. At a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Indonesia’s president stated – according to his interpreter – that Australia should lift its travel warning. Rudd took immediate offense at the apparent attempt to tell his country what to do, and reiterated that the warning would not be lifted. Indonesian officials immediately apologized saying that the interpreter had made an error. What the president actually said with regard to the travel warning was simply that "the situation in Indonesia is good, normal and improved," which the interpreter rendered as "I look forward to this advisory being lifted." The interpreter was certainly right about the intent of the statement, but his free interpretation was a major diplomatic faux pas.
Scapegoating? And it is possible that the interpreter may sometimes simply be a scapegoat in attempts to smooth over an incident caused by someone’s poorly judged remarks. Documented examples of this are hard to come by, but there was a recent incident in which supposed “translation mistakes” in a treaty may have actually been made on purpose to serve political goals. According to the Korean Times, there are suspicions in South Korea that differences between the English and Korean versions of a proposed Free Trade Agreement with the EU were made on purpose to deflect possible bases for political opposition to the agreement. They were not the result of bad translations as claimed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade.
It’s easy to see how blaming a translator or interpreter can be a convenient way out of a sticky situation.
Understanding the challenge Political interpreting is a prestigious job, but, as we have seen, it can be hazardous in many ways. The fact that mistakes have been made, however, should in no way take away from the tremendous skill shown by good interpreters. Running translation of the spoken word takes a very high level of skill in both of the languages involved, as well as an ability to think on one’s feet to render remarks fluently and correctly into another language. It’s not only in the political arena that mistakes can be costly: think of the problems and harm that could be caused by poor medical or legal interpretation.
Good international and inter-cultural communication requires trained interpreters and solid preparation. At MTM LinquaSoft, we not only match interpreters by subject matter expertise, but request that the client provide background materials and terminology in advance. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that anyone who is bilingual can do the job well, or even adequately.
Postscript: Not all interpreter mistakes have bad results. Click here to read how an interpreter’s error got South Korea some free Siberian tigers.
Over the years, MTM LinguaSoft has provided interpreters in many languages for a variety of purposes from consecutive interpretation for business meetings and foreign visitors to simultaneous interpretation for academic and corporate conferences. Like our translators, our interpreters are screened by us before being given an assignment and are chosen by subject matter expertise as well as language skills.
Do They Speak English? An entry on the Economist's blog reports that EF Education First, an English-teaching company, recently compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: 20 million people in 44 countries took identical online tests to measure their proficiency. Some of the results were surprising.
China and India were neck and neck in the rankings (29th and 30th of the 40 countries ranked), despite India's colonial background and the continuing use of English as one of its national languages. China's big push for English education seems to be paying off.
Latin America, despite a long history of US intervention, did the worst as a region, probably because Spanish is also widely used internationally.
How Corrupt Are They?
Every year, Transparency International draws from a variety of surveys and other sources to prepare a ranking of countries according to their Corruption Perception Index, a measure of how corrupt the public sector in various countries is perceived to be by business people and others who operate in those countries. The 2010 index covers 178 countries, which are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the least corrupt. The countries with the worst ratings were clustered in Africa and the Middle East, with Myanmar also joining them. The Scandinavian countries did the best. In case you're wondering, the U.S. came in 22nd.
