UN to Ahmadinejad: Shut Up.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech has become a regular feature of the first furious week of each year’s session. This year, protesters were camped in front of the UN for weeks in anticipation of Ahmadinejad’s next string of offensive remarks, and the US mission had a release expressing outrage ready to go within minutes of the conclusion of his speech.
But a lot of Ahmadinejad’s speech never made it into English, apparently. In what has to be one of the most spectacular translation fails in UN history, much of the speech was not even translated.
A few minutes into the speech, Ahmadinejad interrupted his speech to say, “There’s no translation.” It took about two minutes for the interpreting team to start broadcasting the translation to the half-empty chamber, which in the world of simultaneous interpretation is a dog’s age. In my experience, two minutes of silence from a translation booth is plenty of time to start firing people.
Something was obviously going on up in the interpreting room because, a few minutes later in the speech, the interpreters addressed the assembly directly, stating that they were reading from a written text translated into English. And then the translation stopped. Just stopped. So now only Ahmadinejad and Farsi speakers attending the speech know what the Iranian President actually said.
Had the interpreters been instructed to stick to a script that Ahmadinejad had tossed to the arc of his rhetoric? Believe it or not, that is best practice for trouble-free simultaneous interpretation, and the usual practice for the serious posturing practiced here in Turtle Bay. But great leaders come with great egos, and the sound of their own voice often leads them to flights of rhetoric beyond the teleprompter, leaving linguists scrambling to catch up. But that’s just another day in the interpreter’s booth―nothing that the UN team of interpreters can’t handle.
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