So there we are at this week’s summit of leaders from the continents of North and South America and one of the statesmen present is on the podium, in full flow, on the subject of whether his oratory is sometimes misunderstood.
“Was I great when I spoke to [Vladimir] Putin today?” he declares. “Was I great when I spoke to [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping]… but if the interpreter isn’t speaking right, or is weak, or is ineffective, or is not good, or is not interpreting your words correctly…erm…in one case we had an interpreter who, when she disagreed with what we were saying, she actually changed it… no, the interpreter is… I talk about it all the time… interpreters are really important.
When you don’t speak the language, and they don’t speak the language, people have no idea how valuable… and I’m on them all the time… people have no idea how valuable an interpreter is.”
No prizes for guessing the author of this blinding shaft of perception, this verbatim exposition of the fact that, in order to communicate effectively with someone who doesn’t speak your language, it’s necessary to employ someone who is able to translate your words. It is, as I am sure you can guess, the work of Donald Trump, a man who has turned the careful language of diplomacy into a freeform collection of words and thoughts from which we are meant to find meaning.
How do you accurately translate Trump’s words into Mandarin Chinese? How, in fact, do you sometimes put them into English? There you are, classically trained, for instance, in Russian, and you are presented with a Trumpian stream of consciousness of which you have to make sense, and then re-engineer in coherent, elegant and well-ordered sentences. It’s like you are a concert pianist and are asked to turn Chopsticks into a symphony.
And worse. You then have the man himself offering a critique of your work. “I know if somebody’s good,” said Trump at this week’s summit. “I may not speak the language but I know… When I give a long, flowing, beautiful sentence… and in this case it was a woman and she gave it in about one fourth [sic] the time, I said ‘well their language may be efficient, but it’s not that efficient’.”
Hard to believe, but, yes, this is the leader of the free world speaking, casually insulting the speakers of the more than 7,000 world languages other than English, while aggrandising his own communication skills. Trump is, however, a perfectly good communicator in the sense that he speaks in the colloquial way of all of us, rather than the stilted, often deliberately obtuse language of diplomacy.
The difficulty comes when you try to translate his meandering, half-finished sentences, his mangled expressions and linguistic cul-de-sacs. Do you attempt a literal translation and make the speaker sound like a blithering idiot? Or just relay the gist of it? Or put it into something more statesmanlike?
Picture yourself as the interpreter at the press briefing after a meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The US President is warming to his theme. “I like this guy,” he says. “Strong guy. Tough guy. Great hair. I’ve got terrific hair too. Everyone says so. Beautiful hair, actually.” How on God’s earth are you meant to translate that while also being true to your craft?
And what about the insulting sobriquets for which Trump is justly famous? Sleepy Joe. Little Marco. Crooked Hillary. Interpreters trained in international diplomacy must convey respect and adhere to the standards of courtesy. Trump, meanwhile, has no such constraints. He approaches global politics in the uncompromising way a playground bully approaches a game of British Bulldog.
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How does “fake news” translate into Japanese? And what if you know he’s simply talking nonsense? Do you faithfully pass on to the President of Brazil Trump’s declaration that the crowd at his inauguration was “the greatest in the history of the world” when you know it to be total rubbish?
In this, as in so many other respects, Trump confounds convention. Not for him is the regular expression of nation speaking unto nation. “I look forward to strengthening bilateral co-operation,” is never going to pass his lips. But you might hear him say: “Look, I love your country. Great country, fantastic country actually, but the deal? Terrible deal. Everybody says so, worst deal maybe ever, and we’re going to fix it, believe me.”
Now, can you imagine translating that into Arabic while keeping a straight face?
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