Читаем Is That a Fish in Your Ear? полностью

The number is further reduced by interpreters with two A languages who can work into both, a device called cheval, but also, most crucially, by retour—interpreters who work into their B language as well. The greatest economy of all is of course made by relay. When the Lithuanian delegate speaks, an interpreter with Lithuanian B provides a simultaneous German translation, which the German–English, German–French, and German–Italian interpreters use for their versions in the working languages (and in a 24:4 regime, no further language versions are required). In this example, the hub or pivot language is German; for other languages at the same imaginary meeting, the hub may be English, French, or Italian, bringing the total number of actual bodies needed to service a meeting under 24:4 to a maximum of twenty-eight, and quite a lot fewer if (for example) the Portuguese–French interpreter also does Spanish when French is the hub language, or the Swedish–German interpreter also does Danish when German is the pivot. Because all EU interpreters must have two B languages, the use of asymmetric regimes together with cheval, retour, and relay suffice to provide just about affordable simultaneous interpreting in Brussels and Luxembourg, and at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.[157]

At the UN, the system is often invisible to users. Interpreters are placed at the rear or the side of the assembly hall behind soundproofed and tinted glass screens. You can attend a dozen meetings without even realizing the interpreters are physically present—so it’s only natural they should get taken for granted. What’s more insidious than the occlusion of the interpreting magic, however, is the impression that anything you say can be simultaneously heard in all other tongues. Conference interpreting, glamorous though it is, buries the real difficulties—and the real interest—of language transfer beneath sophisticated, almost circuslike tricks of the language trade. It makes people think that it’s only a matter of time before we can all have a device to stick in our ear—the “Babel fish” of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—to provide us with instant communication with all the peoples on earth.

Unlike most translators in written mode and a high proportion of consecutive interpreters, conference interpreters are rarely specialists in any particular field and come closest to being pure language professionals. Few domain-specific organizations are sufficiently large to justify having salaried interpreters on their books: only sixty-seven organizations in the world employ members of AIIC (the interpreters’ professional body) as full-time staff, and only four (the UN in Geneva and New York, and two of the International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague) employ more than ten. As a result, most of the three thousand members of AIIC (and a roughly equal number of nonmembers) work freelance and travel from conference to conference, dealing with all sorts and kinds of topics. Fast-talking yet good listeners, interpreters must be both alert and relaxed, able to tolerate unspeakably boring harangues but also quick to pick up the gist when something entirely new comes on the agenda. They belong to a rare breed.

They might become even rarer, because there are several threats to the survival of the species. First, the precipitous decline in the teaching of foreign languages in the English-speaking world in the last fifty years means that there are ever fewer entrants to the profession with English A. If you prevented boys from having bicycles, then the Tour de France would become a celebration of geriatric fitness in a decade or two, and then stop. If you don’t teach native English speakers two languages out of Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and French intensively to high levels while they are young, you will not have candidates for interpreter training within ten or fifteen years. There are many English–Spanish bilinguals, of course, but very few of them have another UN language to the requisite degree of fluency. If the requirement were lowered from two to one foreign language for English A, then the system could be run on relay and retour, and staffing problems would be less acute. However, because ten applicants to a translators’ school produce no more than five entrants, and because barely one third of those graduating will be found good enough to enter the profession, large investment in language education throughout the English-speaking world is urgently needed. Without it, the next cohort of our politicians and diplomats, businessmen and consultants, human rights campaigners, international lawyers, and policy wonks may well be reduced to stuffing fish in both ears.

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