A simultaneous interpreter for the U.N. on political jargon
And the institution's linguistic Esperanto
Lynn Visson was a staff interpreter at the United Nations for 25 years. This article appeared in the London Review of Books.
The six booths correspond to the UN’s six official languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. International organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund also use these languages at their conferences.
But the most important language in most international organisations has no name: it is the institution’s own bureaucratese, its linguistic Esperanto. We never do something, we implement. We don’t repeat, we reiterate and underscore. We are never happy, we are gratified or satisfied. You are never doing a great job: you are performing your duties in the outstanding manner in which you have always discharged them.
There is no theft or embezzlement, but rather failure to ensure compliance with proper accounting and auditing procedures in the handling of financial resources. This is a language the interpreter must master very early on. . . .
Today’s Russian speeches are light years away from those of the Cold War, when the country was permanently on the road to victory, Put k pobede, and interpreters were confined to lexically limited and semantically predictable Marxist jargon. Oxymorons — the “fight for peace” and an “arsenal” of ideas — were part of the basic vocabulary and we could all spit out in two seconds the familiar titles, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev. Nobody noticed when once at top speed I tripped over my tongue, saying “Supreme Sodium.”
Today Russian speeches run the gamut from bureaucratic jargon to street slang, and are stuffed with English cognates such as killer for a hired assassin or piarshchik for public relations man. There are also plenty of new false friends of the translator, such as the ubiquitous adekvatnyi, which means appropriate or proper, not adequate, or utilizirovat, meaning to dispose of rather than to utilise, as one interpreter learned to his chagrin during a bout of arms negotiations.
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