 warn speakers that they were going too fast, a red one meant that they should stop and repeat what they had said. Dostert brought IBM in to develop a system of microphones and headsets to transmit the four languages.
Despite all the difficulties Dostert’s system somehow worked and it was subsequently adopted by the United Nations with its six official languages. However, it is the European Union, and not the United Nations, which is the largest employer of interpreters in the world. The United Nations may have more members, but the European Union currently has 24 official languages, which must be a logistical nightmare.
On the surface the difference between translation and interpreting is merely the medium: the former is written, whereas the latter is spoken. But it seems to me a completely different world. The skills you need for the interpreters’ booth are vastly different from those of a traditional translator. As I pointed out in Translation: the other side of the tapestry you have to be constantly making decisions about how you want to render a word, phrase or passage. You tend to agonise over the choice of words which will best allow you to render the idea in the target language. Obviously this is not an option in interpretation. You have to be decisive because any delay and you may lose a few words (and possibly a thought) that the speaker uttered. Once it’s gone there is no way for you to get it back. I am in awe of interpretation. There is a one-second delay between what the speaker says and the interpreter translating it. I just can’t get my head around how anyone could translate at the same time as someone is speaking, I would just freak out. But I guess it’s a skill that somehow people learn. Here we can see Richard Fleming, who used to work for the EU Commission, explaining his craft:
My final question is whether it would be possible for machines to provide automatic simultaneous interpretation. In Star Trek Captain Kirk and the crew the Starship Enterprise were able to converse in fluent English with any of the aliens they encountered when they were boldly going where no men had been before. Apparently wore tiny, computerised Universal Translators that could scan alien brainwaves and simultaneously convert their concepts into appropriate English words. We haven’t quite got that far. What we do have is Skype Translator. From what I could see, it was a bit basic, but who knows what technology will bring us in the future?