Interpreters in Literature

 By Hugo Pooley, Aib

Reading Antonio Muñoz Molina's magnificent early - 1991 - novel “El Jinete Polaco” recently prompted me to undertake a modest, non-exhaustive, survey of novels involving interpreters and perhaps share a few musings on how realistic, or not, their treatment has been.

As most of our readers will know, the distinction between translators and interpreters is that the former work in writing and the latter orally; but in practice interpreters often get called “translators” in error. Some of us have been quite exercised about this confusion in the past. But surely the time has now come to give this little battle up as lost - how important is it? 

Thus the protagonist of Muñoz Molina's book is an Andalusia-born “traductor simultáneo” working inter alia in the US; although for the purposes of the plot he might as well have been in any other peripatetic occupation, for example, an airline pilot. 

This particular fictional colleague seems at times to be regrettably subservient to the agency for which he works on the private market in Spain. But where the author mainly shows an unrealistic view of our activity is in his repeated insistence on the importance of words, the challenge of processing all the words in the original:

“a veces, cuando he pasado todo el día trabajando, me duermo y sueño que no he salido de la cabina de traducción, y las palabras me empujan, me envuelven, me arrastran en cenagales de caligrafía, de discursos fotocopiados, de libros que se van escribiendo a medida que yo los leo e intento traducirlos. En Bruselas llueve y no hay nadie por la calle, en un salón de actos se ha prolongado interminablemente una conferencia sobre aranceles agrícolas o sobre las normas de fabricación de preservativos y los traductores soñolientos miran por el cristal de sus cabinas y buscan equivalencias instantáneas para las palabras absurdas que escuchan en los auriculares pensando en otra cosa”

“el zumbido tenue en los auriculares, las primeras palabras, lentas todavía, protocolarias, previsibles, fotocopiadas en la carpeta que me entregaron cuando vine, la urgencia ávida de atraparlas en el instante en que suenan y convertirlas en otras unas décimas de segundo después, el miedo a perder una sola, una palabra clave, porque entonces las que vienen tras ella se desbordarán como una catarata y ya no será posible restituirles el orden”

It may be true that words are the building blocks of the languages that we learn and of the material on which we work. In a deeper sense, however, they are actually irrelevant, for we really deal in sense. After all, when the substance of any message is remembered, whether by an interpreter or not, surely the actual words are often forgotten, undetermined? The three stages (in interpreting) of comprehension, deverbalization and reformulation go a little further than merely eschewing literal translation. This is the nub of the Interpretive Theory of Translation (of interpreting) researchers' théorie du sens, encapsulated in the immortal Seleskovitch's triangle.

This model states that the interpreter transfers the meaning from the original words into (non verbal) sense and then from that sense into other words in the target language.

The great Lewis Carroll was, as always, (talking of the uselessness of literal translations) “on the money” when he wrote in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”, “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves”. 

Thus also the longstanding slogan coined in and for AIB: “We say what you mean” - our very own creation, despite subsequent plagiarism!

The main character in “Corazón tan blanco”, by the extraordinary contemporary Spanish writer Javier Marías, is also an interpreter. Prior to its publication a dear colleague of ours interpreted him on the legendary French television programme “Apostrophes” and was extensively quizzed over apéritif at the studio afterwards about the way the profession works. Again, however, the result in the book seems somewhat distant from real life. And not just in the hilarious, mythical, scene where the interpreter deliberately, mischievously, progressively, subverts an interview between the thinly disguised Felipe González and Margaret Thatcher by consistently corrupting its content. Jaime Deza, the protagonist of Marías's tour de force trilogy “Tu Rostro Mañana”, is never really quite an interpreter: rather, his occupation combines facets of academic, translator, spy, and seer… But throughout it Marías is, as so often, concerned with linguistic, cultural and historical communication between English- and Spanish-speaking ambits.

All these writers are absolutely recommended, irrespective of whether they depict interpreters or not!

There is, furthermore, a category of interpreters who have become writers but did not include any interpreters among their characters.

The peerless Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who was born in Brussels and of whom one may see a statue next to Place Brugmann there, worked as a translator and interpreter for organisations such as UNESCO. He refers to the mental fatigue brought about by a day in the simultaneous interpreter´s booth, the overwhelming sensation of processing so much information; and alludes to the virtues of wine as a remedy.

The admirable Eduardo Mendoza was a true-life interpreter at the United Nations and also on the private market who later chose a career transition, becoming a writer (of such marvels as the Barcelona-based “La ciudad de los prodigios”).

José Ovejero was an interpreter for the European Commission in Brussels for over a decade at the end of last century. He has covered a range of genres, notably fine travel writing, and is best known for his award-winning novel “La invención del amor”.

In these last cases interpreting's loss was clearly literature´s great gain!

Other novels featuring interpreters include “The summer before the dark” by Doris Lessing, “The Mission Song” by John Le Carré, “Travesuras de la niña mala” by Mario Vargas Llosa, and “The hundred-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared” by Jonas Jonasson.

On the whole, then: is our professional practice generally misunderstood? - oh, the irony! But does it matter?

Also, is there possibly a gap on the literary market for a more realistic creation? But it would take considerable skill to make our little concerns interesting to a broader audience?