They can take another’s words and sentences and reshape them - theGuardian.com
Back in 1985, the Irish government asked me to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which took place that year in Budapest. The theme was culture, hence the choice of a novelist, and a political ignoramus such as myself, to be the delegate from Ireland.
At the time the cold war was still distinctly warm, there was very little cooperation between east and west, and no one felt particularly secure. The conference rapidly degenerated into a slanging match between the American and Russian delegations, over the heads of us inconsequential Europeans.
I had prepared a very short address, in which I spun out a few variations on those lovely lines from Sonnet 65, “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” I also quoted Theodor Adorno, as best I could from memory, to the effect that political art is neither art nor political.
The delegate who spoke before me was a scowling middle-aged lady from Bulgaria. We had been strictly instructed to limit our addresses to 10 minutes maximum; she finally wound up after an hour. I took off my headphones and was consulting my speech, when the British delegation, at their desk beside mine, burst into loud laughter. Afterwards the delegation leader, the sleekly elegant Norman St John-Stevas, came to apologise. “You had taken off your headphones,” he said, “so you didn’t hear, as we did, the interpreter saying of our Bulgarian colleague, ‘My God, I thought that bitch would never stop talking’.”
I have related this anecdote to many interpreters, and each one of them, looking slightly sheepish, said the woman in the glass booth had probably known exactly what she was doing when she failed to switch off her microphone prior to making her remark about the comrade from Sofia. Interpreting is a thankless job – often the interpreters are not even visible to the people for whom they are interpreting – and sometimes they exact their revenge.