Last week, as one does, I was peeping
some UN pics, and I noticed something: Big. Boxy. Earpieces. Everywhere.
Do these plug you into the Illuminati mainframe? Charge a robo-diplomat? Is T. Swift
farming streams in the Security Council? I put my outside correspondent Amy on the case and
turns out… no. Instead, these things are how diplomats get reliable, real-time translations for
every sentence spoken on the UN floor. But where do those translations come from? Whose voice is
in the earpiece? And how do they do it so fast? The first thing you need to know is
that the UN has six official languages: Arabic, British English, French, Mandarin
Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. That means, among other things, that if you’re sitting
at a meeting in the General Assembly, anything you read or hear will be available to you
in all six. It does not, however, mean that all the signs around you will be in Arabic—those are
in English and French, the two working languages of the UN’s executive branch, i.e. the ones the
operation gets managed in. But if you’re actually doing peace talks rather than communicating
what’s on the second floor, all six are in play. Every seat in the GA and Security Council—from
the nosebleeds to the big ones—has an earpiece and some little buttons you hit until you hear
your language of choice, or the ever-mysterious “Unknown…” which I’m guessing is either Simlish,
Toddler, or Marshmallow-In-Mouth. The disembodied voice you’ll hear isn’t actually that far away. In
fact, you can see them from where you’re sitting. The interpretation booths are right up here, each
labeled with their language. There are industry standards for just about everything inside: the
lighting, the air circulation, the soundproofing, how comfortable the chairs are… but a copy of that
standard costs 96 Swissfrancs for some reason, so we’re gonna live without the details.
Each booth must always have at least two interpreters inside—which, by the way, is the
word we should be using here. “Translators,” in this context, handle written stuff, while
“interpreters” do the blabbing. Anyway, every interpreter at the UN is a native speaker of
their booth’s language, i.e. they interpret into the language they know best, since it takes more
language mastery to communicate your thoughts than to understand someone else’s. Someone staffing the
French booth, for example, either grew up speaking French, went to school in French, or both.
If a diplomat’s speaking Spanish, the French interpreter spits it out in French. If she’s
speaking French, the folks in the French booth go chill mode while the other five interpret.
The UN tends to staff the booths such that each one can cover at least three of the six
official languages. So the Russian booth, for example, might contain two lifelong Russian
speakers, both of whom can understand English, one of whom can understand French, and one
of whom can understand Chinese. But what happens if someone on the floor is speaking a
language a booth doesn’t have covered? What if someone’s talking in Arabic, and nobody in the
Spanish booth understands it, and vice versa? In this case, they employ what’s called a “relay
system.” Maybe there aren’t any Arabic-Spanish interpreters, but there is a Spanish interpreter
that knows English. So an Arabic interpreter would exit chill mode and interpret the speech
from Arabic to English for the person in the Spanish booth, who would then interpret that from
English to Spanish, so when you turn your earpiece to “Spanish,” you’d hear an interpretation of an
interpretation of a speech, all in near-real time. This happens pretty often: English-Spanish
interpreters are dime-a-dozen, but what about Russian-Spanish? Arabic-Spanish? Chinese-French?
Those are unicorns. In fact, the UN needs a relay system so often when interpreting from Arabic
and Chinese that all the interpreters who work in those two booths must be able to interpret
both into their main language, like normal, and out of it, for relay purposes. This
means there are often three people in those booths instead of two, and that they
very rarely get to experience chill mode. To avoid muddling things too much, the UN only
allows one middleman language when they go into a relay system. So while you could hear words
that went from Arabic to English to Spanish, they wouldn’t give you a live interpretation
that had gone from Arabic to English to Russian to Chinese then back to Arabic
for kicks then to Unknown then to Spanish. “But Sam,” you’ve surely wondered by now, “There
are 49 countries that don’t widely speak one of the six official UN languages, according to the
Wikipedia page I’m looking at. What if someone gives a speech in Japanese? Portuguese? Hindi?”
Hey, good question! If you want to speak any language outside of the six, you have to provide
an interpreter who can interpret live from your language into one of the six, then the UN’s staff
will get it from there into the remaining five. As far as I can tell, the UN keeps about
120 interpreters in their full-time staff, and they’re tough spots to get. The UN only
offers exams for each language combination roughly every three years, and you need a lot
of qualifications to even take one. And if you ace it, and nail all the following tests and
interviews, you get a two year appointment, after which they’ll either promote you or let you
go. You could also land amongst the freelancers: the people the UN calls upon when they don’t have
enough interpreters around to cover what they have going on. Fun fact: Freelance interpreters
at the UN make a devilish 666 dollars a day, which I know because I read the UN and the
Interpreters’ Association’s 34-page freelance employee agreement for fun, and I didn’t even have
to fork over 96 Swiss Francs for the privilege. From 1984 to 1985, the only year for which I could
find the stat I wanted, the UN spent a total of 78 million US dollars on interpretation—equivalent
to over 235 million dollars today. But of course interpretation is expensive! Being able to tune
in live to what’s being said in front of you in a completely different language than the one
being spoken is basically magic. Mind you, when some guys did it in the Bible, it counted
as a miracle. They made it a holiday. Now interpreters do it every day, and where’s their
holiday? Well, the first Wednesday in May, actually, but what are you doing to celebrate?
Doing a live interpretation demands a combination of preparation, skill, and instinct. To prep,
interpreters get some advance information about the meeting they’re covering: They’ll know
the subject matter and niche jargon they may come across, plus they get advance copies of the
documents attendees will have, and sometimes even a copy of the speeches people are planning
to deliver. They’re trained to understand every regional accent of the language they’re
interpreting from, and they know how to maintain the perfect delay between when the speaker
is talking and when they start interpreting. They need to delay enough that they can understand
people’s full idea before they start repeating it, but if they delay too much, they might give
themselves too much to recall from short-term memory while also trying to listen to what the
speaker is still saying. The rest is instinct: interpreters have to match their speaker’s tone
and anticipate the end of their sentences to keep up pace. They can’t ask speakers to slow down or
repeat themselves, they just have to nail it and keep listening. Also, this is all happening
at about 120 words per minute, as fast as an average Biden State of the Union. Neurologists are
still trying to figure out exactly how they do it, but one study found that interpretation doesn’t
just use the parts of the brain that processes language or talks, it draws on capacity from other
parts of the brain that handle movement and stuff just to coordinate all that listening,
processing, interpreting, and speaking. And if that sounds exhausting to you, it is! Staff
interpreters only cover seven or eight meetings, each three hours long, per week. And during
those meetings, they’ll swap out with another interpreter every 20-30 minutes lest they
tucker their brains out and threaten a country with “juice and s’mores” instead of “nuclear
wars.” Because sure, little errors in the live interpretations get cleaned up before entering the
record, but big errors just can’t happen. I mean, it’s the UN. There’s almost nowhere that “knowing
exactly what someone else said” matters more. So here’s to you, UN interpreters, up in
your boxes, making diplomacy happen from the sidelines. You deserve some nuclear
wars—no! Shoot! Juice and s’mores!! Man, I am not cut out for this job. Quel dommage…
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