Interpreters as Diplomats: A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Politics

CHAPTER 5 Outstanding Interpreters

CHAPTERS OUTSTANDING INTERPRETERS It might be enlightening to take a peek at the careers of a few of the more outstanding interpreters of the 20th century. As should have become apparent by now, the best linguists are bona fide intellectuals, as the career of Jean Herbert (1952) amply testifies. A specialist in Oriental philosophy and a professor of French in Scotland before World War I, Herbert served as an officer with the British, French and American armies during the war, writing a bilingual glossary of artillery and ballistics terminology that was published in 1919. During the 1917 Anglo-French financial negotiations in London, he began his career as a conference interpreter. Herbert, who interpreted for many of the European conferences of 1919, recalls a session lasting a month, at which he was the sole interpreter, working six days a week in French, English and German. At one point, he momentarily fell asleep on his feet, but apparently continued to talk without anyone noticing the incident (Herbert 1978:7). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he worked at mostof the great international conferences sponsored by the Leagueof Nations and for over 100different international organizations. The list of world leaders for whom he interpreted includes nearly all the notables of that period. Upon the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, Herbert was invited to organize the corps of interpreters, which he then directed for three years. Paul Mantoux (fig. 5), a towering figure of all time in his exacting profession, was such a public attraction that people 157 INTERPRETERS AS DIPLOMATS attended the sessions of the League of Nations just to watch him in action. At a disarmament conference of the League of Nations, Sir John Simon, the British delegate, had concluded his speech with a quotation from Shelley, just the sort of thing interpreters most dread. But Mantoux, without a moment's hesitation, "rendered the Shelley quotation in French verse, reaching a peak which will never be surpassed in the history of the art [of interpreting]'7 (Ranshofen-Wertheimer 1925:141). About Paul Mantoux, the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote this testimony: It is fitting to digress for a moment and to say a word of Professor Mantoux, who wore a French captain's uniform, and was inherited by the Council of Ten from the Supreme War Council. No interpreter could have performed his onerous task with greater skill than he. Possessing an unusual memory for thought and phrase, he did not interpret sentence by sentence, but, while an address or statement was being made, he listened intently, occasionally jotting down a note with the stub of a lead pencil. When the speaker had finished, this remarkable linguist would translate his remarks into English or into French as the case might be, without the least hesitation and with a fluency and completeness which were almost uncanny. Even if the speaker had consumed ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes, the address was accurately repeated in the other language, while Professor Mantoux would employ inflection and emphasis with an oratorical skill that added greatly to the perfectness of the interpretation. No statement was too dry to make him inattentive or too technical for his vocabulary. Eloquence, careful reasoning, and unusual style in expression were apparently easily rendered into idiomatic English from French, or vice versa. He seemed almost to take over the character of the individual whose words he translated, and to reproduce his emotions as well as his thoughts. His extraordinary attainments were recognized by every one who benefitted by them, and his services commanded general admiration and praise (Lansing 1972:105-106). At the end of the Peace Conference (1919), Mantoux, a historian , became head of the Political Section of the League of Nations. In 1927, with William Rappard he founded the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (Delisle and Woodsworth 1995:263-264; Link 1992; Salomon 1993). 158 OUTSTANDING INTERPRETERS Figure 8. Winston Churchill, interpreter Arthur Hurbert Birse and Joseph Stalin (Potsdam, July 1945). A.H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter. London: Michael Joseph, 1967. An even more colorful life was that of A.H. Birse (fig.8). Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1891, Birse may have had his future career predetermined for him simply because his parents , unlike most overseas Britons, did not return him to England for his schooling, thus enabling him to acquire native fluency in Russian. In 1917, at the age...