Interpreters In Transitional Justice
While simultaneous interpretation has now very much become a commonplace in the conduct of international meetings, what was it like for the interpreters at Nuremberg and what is it like now for the interpreters who work at the ICTY in The Hague and the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania? What is it like to be the mouthpiece of a war criminal? What is it like to have to re-tell the stories of the victims?
Martyn Swain tackles these issues in his Masters’ dissertation which he sums up for CALLIOPE.
Apart from interpreters themselves, few people know that simultaneous interpretation was used in earnest for the first time at an international criminal tribunal, - the Nuremberg Trials, - at the end of 1945. What is also little known is that simultaneous interpretation was never used again in an international criminal tribunal until the establishment of the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. What are the implications for the interpreters?
One of the things that people often don’t realise is that interpreters speak in the first person: they say “I did this”, “I took the Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica into the forest and killed them”, or “I climbed into a tree to escape the Interahamwe but I had to watch while they raped my 6-year old daughter”. And even though they are speaking on someone else’s behalf, the interpreters have to faithfully re-enact the narrative in order to do justice to it. If they don’t, then they are denying a voice to the victim or the perpetrator and the result is that one of the key aspirations of Transitional Justice, that people should be able to tell their stories, is also denied.
Of course, the International Criminal Tribunals set out to punish perpetrators but both the ICTY and the ICTR are designed to have a social function as well and to contribute to post-conflict reconciliation. The interpreters who service the hearings have to perform a dual function, too. They have to be able to convey accurately and to the satisfaction of the court complex legal argument and they have to enable witnesses to be heard by the world. In fact, the interpreters are often faced with interpreting legal terms which don’t even have equivalents in the other language as the Kinyarwanda interpreters at the ICTR attest. Not only this, but what the interpreters say ultimately becomes the court record and may be used as a legal precedent to try individuals in the future. This puts huge pressure on the interpreter to be absolutely accurate and faithfully reproduce what is said even though what is said may be nonsensical or unclear. This is, after all, what the court prescribes. On the other hand, they become the mouthpiece for someone whose suffering has effectively severed the link between them and the rest of society.
At the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the simultaneous interpreters, who were all from South Africa, faced all these challenges as well. Many of them say they were profoundly affected by the stories they told and re-told. Victims and perpetrators all sat together in the Human Rights Commission hearings and the interpreters would face the victims as they described what had been done to them by their oppressors. They said that it felt like they were doing it to them all over again.
Clearly, it takes an enormous amount of professionalism and emotional resilience to perform as an interpreter in settings such as these. The interpreters are entrusted with conveying testimony that is distressing and possibly inarticulate, and with confronting an accused with a detailed indictment in legal language that the source and target languages do not share. They have to accept that what they say will become the record of the proceedings and will thus possibly become the basis for future case law. They are expected to do this and at the same time remain transparent and invisible and not to leave any trace of themselves on the original utterance that could be attributed to their own prejudice or predisposition. While most people speak only on their own behalf, the interpreter is expected to remain neutral and detached while speaking in the first person on behalf of hundreds of different individuals whose utterances they are required to render as fully and faithfully as possible. How do they cope?
After researching the subject for the last couple of years, Martyn Swain, a conference interpreter himself with more than 30 years experience, and Calliope member for Southern Africa, has come to the conclusion that what is expected of the interpreters working in these settings is at the limit of what can be achieved by even the most seasoned professional. Furthermore, the more “seasoned” one becomes, the more likely one is to be irrevocably affected as an individual. Don’t take it from him, take it from François Bembatoum, former ICTR Chief Interpreter who said in an interview in 2008, “The day you are able to walk out of court and crack a joke and laugh out loud, it means that you are already changing. It means that you have become less sensitive to human suffering. I think that my nature is no longer the same. I am a different person”.
If you are interested in finding out more, the title of Martyn’s Masters dissertation is: The Professional Interpreter in Transitional Justice: An Empirical Study. It can be accessed through the University of Cape Town.
Martyn Swain
Member of Calliope in South Africa
