VOICES for the week of 26 february

Region

TP and Isratine
Any journalist, businessman, NGO worker or academic working in a country where they do not speak the local language will know that a good interpreter is worth their weight in gold. Yet as crucial as these individuals are to the functioning of any international mission, summit or news bureau, their contribution generally goes unnoticed. In a rare incidence of an interpreter actually making it into the bylines, the man giving the simultaneous interpretation for Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's rambling speech at the UN Summit in New York in September collapsed 75 minutes into the podium-hogging monologue, screaming "I can't take it anymore!" Apparently, the interpreter lost the strength to continue around the point at which Gaddafi embarked on his explanation of how the Israel-Palestine conflict could be solved by a single statecalled 'Isratine'.

This leads into my other point: Interpreters must be subjected to a level of crushing tedium that I suspect would be difficult for 'internationals' like me to fully appreciate. "It's the stupidest job in the world," one ex-interpreter told me. For him, the daily ennui of translating the same banal, rambling and sometimes completely moronic interview questions became too much to bear, and he moved on to other things. It must be truly galling to hold two higher degrees, speak two Southasian languages and four dialects fluently, and to spend most of the time using these to ask questions such as, Where can you buy toilet paper round here?