White House Interpreter The Art of Interpretation Harry Obst AuthorHouse™ 1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington, IN 47403 www.authorhouse.com Phone: 1-800-839-8640 © 2010 Harry Obst. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author. First published by AuthorHouse 4/12/2010 ISBN: 978-1-4520-0616-1 (e) ISBN: 978-1-4520-0615-4 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4520-0614-7 (hc) Library of Congress Control Number: 2010904282 Printed in the United States of America Bloomington, Indiana Th is book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix Lyndon B. Johnson 1 THE ART OF INTERPRETATION 33 Richard M. Nixon 67 Gerald R. Ford 87 Interpreting at Economic Summits 113 Jimmy Carter 143 Escort Interpreting 171 Ronald W. Reagan 201 Unusual Encounters on the Language Bridge 223 Training Interpreters in the United States 249 Biographical Data 263 v Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to my friend Robert E. Field of Pennsylvania. Without his motivational prodding, generous support, caustic but productive criticism, and his conviction that this book was needed to fi ll a long-existing gap, it might never have been completed. Next, I wish to thank my wife Elnina, who keeps an orderly and clean house, for putting up with endless months of boxes, piles of papers, and books cluttering up the family environment. I owe thanks to several colleagues and friends who volunteered to read a chapter or two and helped to weed out my mistakes. My gratitude also reaches back to several presidents and their assistants, from Lyndon Johnson to George Herbert Walker Bush, who have graciously provided me with copies of offi cial photographs, some of which help to illustrate this book. Finally, I wish to salute the interpreters and translators of the Offi ce of Language Services of the Department of State in Washington, an offi ce that I had the privilege of heading from 1984 to 1997. Frequently understaff ed and underfunded, and often underappreciated, they have served the White House, the cabinet offi cers, and the leaders of Congress with outstanding professional skills, deep patriotic loyalty, and tireless and unselfi sh devotion. vii Introduction Between November of 1985 and May of 1988, one of the most important series of discussions between two men in all of human history took place. At stake were hundreds of billions of dollars and the fate of hundreds of millions of people. Th e success or failure of these talks would dramatically shape or change the future of many countries in the 1990s and well into the third millennium. Th ose countries included the two mightiest on the globe, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, as well as some of the smallest, which had yearned for decades to regain their freedom of thought and action, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Uzbekistan. Th e talks between two former archenemies were diffi cult, overshadowed by mutual distrust and suspicion, jeopardized by occasional outbursts of anger and surges of impatience. On those turbulent waves of suspicions and frequent misunderstandings of each other’s true motives, of general overtures, specifi c suggestions, and calculated probes rode the fragile ship of mutual hope and basic goodwill that had brought the two leaders together in the fi rst place. One, a courageous revolutionary with a sparkling intellect, the other a conservative, patriotic, and idealistic American who was tormented by the specter of a possible nuclear war, ix but who also understood that now there existed an opportunity to end the cold war that was likely to precipitate that catastrophe. Every hour of their private discussions was weighty and precarious. Many a sentence spoken in those meetings was of great consequence. Most people would believe that Ronald Reagan was listening and speaking to Mikhail Gorbachev and vice versa. But that was not the case. In most meetings, Gorbachev was speaking to Pavel Palazchenko and listening carefully to Dimitry Zarechnak. And Reagan did not hear the Soviet arguments and entreaties as presented by Gorbachev, because he did not speak any Russian. Every phrase came to him as it was fashioned and presented by Palazchenko. Every time he wanted to make a point to Gorbachev, he had to make that point to Zarechnak, who had to analyze his spoken words and gestures carefully to divine the true underlying meaning before he could make the equivalent argument in Russian to the Soviet leader. Th e success or failure of these private meetings did not just rest on the shoulders of the two principal interlocutors. Th ey rested in large measure on the analytical abilities, intellectual acumen, communication skills, and emotional stability of the only two people the leaders could fully understand—their professional interpreters. Few people, especially in the United States, understand the profession of interpretation. Th ey know what lawyers, engineers, architects, and brain surgeons are all about. But the art of interpretation is a mystery to many. Th ey may assume that it consists of bilingual people changing words spoken in one language into the same words of another language. Th at is not at all x what professional interpretation is. In challenging situations, accurate interpretation is no less sophisticated, complex, and intellectually demanding than brain surgery. Th e professional interpreter is required to carry more general knowledge into each job than architects and engineers need in the daily exercise of their profession. It requires the analytical skills of trial lawyers and their acting ability in the courtroom. It also requires a great deal of creativity. It is a true profession in the academic sense of the word, but American universities have not bothered to seriously analyze it and embrace it. As a result, they neither understand it nor off er it a home alongside other professions of equal value for the welfare of their country. Th e fi rst object of this book is to explain to the reader what the art of interpretation is and what it covers, from diplomatic interpreting to practicing the profession in the courtroom, hospital, the European Union, on live television, or escorting foreign visitors on long study tours. Th e second purpose is to sound a trumpet call for long overdue action in overhauling this profession in the United States. Th ere are more high- quality interpreting schools at the academic institutions of tiny Finland than in all of the universities of the United States combined. Our ignorance and neglect of the professions of interpretation and translation is costing the United States hundreds of billions of lost export earnings each year and thousands of American and foreign lives lost in the wars that we are drawn into. Th ere is much other damage done to our society because of this neglect: letting criminals go free and innocents go to jail because of faulty interpretation, depriving foreign visitors or speakers of other languages of proper medical care in our xi hospitals and doctor’s offi ces, and even exonerating wife beaters while deporting their battered spouses. Th e book is designed to stay away from theory while it enlightens you. It is not written for the American academic community, where virtually nobody has been listening for over a hundred years anyhow. Nowhere is the ignorance about professional interpretation greater than at our universities, which are preoccupied with the teaching of theoretical linguistics, a discipline of little value to society when compared with the many benefi ts derived from applied language training. Nowhere is the profession more neglected. Th erefore, this book is written for the average reader in language everybody can understand. It uses a minimum of linguistic terminology. If the current sad state of the profession is ever to improve in the United States, interested groups from outside academia will have to take action. And they might do that once they understand what is at stake for them and the country. It is also written for the American business community. Th e absence of well-trained and reliable interpreters is costing our economy not only hundreds of billions in lost export earnings but also many millions in other economic damage. Once businesses understand this, they may be willing to motivate American universities to provide the interpreter and translator training that the American economy and society need. Th e federal government and interpretation experts have urged the universities to provide this training for decades and never gotten a meaningful response. Th e day that the American business community demands such training, academia may fi nally listen. Successful bold initiatives in this country usually come from the private sector. xii Th is book is written by a professional interpreter who knows the profession from working in the trenches (courts, escort trips, military missions) and from interpreting for seven American presidents. It is written by an author who for thirteen years was the director of the Offi ce of Language Services at the U.S. Department of State in Washington (more than one thousand contract and staff interpreters work for this offi ce). It is written by a person who ran an interpreting school for seven years and who was its principal instructor. Th is is not a book of theories. It is a book based on reality and empirical knowledge. It is written to entertain you while it informs you. I include fi ve chapters on my work with American presidents, looking at them from the interpreter’s perspective inside the Oval Offi ce and elsewhere. It gives you a feel for the daily experiences of interpreters by recounting challenging, highly satisfying, and very disappointing days.