I have worked as both a translator and an interpreter and I know how hard it is, so my heart went out to Valentina Maiolini-Rothbacher, the interpreter whose session at the White House with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Trump went horribly wrong last Thursday.
In the clip, we are not shown the whole conversation and we cannot see where exactly the interpreter was or what equipment, if any, she had. However, we can hear the panic in her voice as she struggles to keep up with the conversation and she almost referred to signora Meloni as "president", only just managing to correct the word to "prime minister" in time. (In Italian the prime minister's title is Presidente del Consiglio dei ministri and it does cause confusion to English speakers.) This is not a mistake that one would expect an experienced interpreter to make. It is just after this point that Meloni becomes exasperated and interrupts her, saying, "Faccio io" ("I'll do it"), which she did, and very well. I understand her frustration and the interpreter has since said that the prime minister had been right to interrupt.
But what happened? Ms Maiolini-Rothbacher, distressed the next morning at finding her name splashed all over the Italian press (with the foreign newspapers following suit later) said that she did not know what had happened to her brain but also that the room had been crowded, from which we can infer that there was extraneous noise, which there should not have been. We also do not know how long the conversation had gone on before the interruption or whether the interlocutors had simply not paused for the interpreter to speak. (Simultaneous translation is particularly difficult and at the UN interpreters alternate every twenty minutes or so, because the pressure of the job is so high.) Or perhaps it was just a poor translation set-up from the beginning.
I understand that Ms Maiolini-Rothbacher's mother tongue is Italian, so why was she interpreting from that language into the target language of English? This is not how interpreters usually work.
Prime Minister Meloni's English is good but that said, very few statesmen or stateswomen are linguists, which may partly explain what is wrong with the world. Reliance on interpreters must be frustrating at times but it is necessary. That, in my opinion, is partly what caused the upset at the White House for President Zelensky, who has excellent English but is not a native speaker and there were matters he could have discussed more tactfully. I have noticed that he has been using interpreters since that incident.
In English in particular, a misplaced tone, a wrong preposition and especially an erroneous stress pattern could be disastrous in an international negotiation or a business or legal situation. Here is an example:
"I'm going to drop nuclear bombs" with stress on "drop" and slight pause before "nuclear" = "I'm going to stop using nuclear bombs."
"I'm going to drop nuclear bombs" with no pause and stress on "bombs" = "I'm going to destroy the world."
I hear your question: "What about AI?" It is my understanding that in the publishing world a non-fiction book can be translated using AI very quickly indeed and copies can be on sale almost simultaneously with the original but I would have doubts regarding the quality of such translations. Fiction, however, is another matter because it depends on tone, style, nuance, imagery and so many other literary techniques. It is also important to be able to convey the author's particular "voice".
There are some horrific examples of AI translations or transcriptions on video clips and in one clip from a 1950s US comedy series (a transcription of English subtitles) a character called Ethel has her name written as "arsehole"because the AI programme is transcribing what it thinks it hears. If you are ever introduced to someone whose name is Ethel and you say, "Hello, Arsehole" I do not think her reply will be very friendly!
Going back to the White House interpreting scene, I hope that Ms Maiolini-Rothbacher is feeling a little better. News moves so fast these days that the world will have forgotten the incident soon. I just wish that more people, particularly those whose job is to set up translation or interpreting situations, understood how demanding this work can be.
