In the press room of the European Commission, Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, takes to the podium … and starts speaking in Greek. In the Slovak booth next to the stage, Janka Nagyova and her colleague have a momentary panic! Neither of them speaks Greek. But they have to interpret into Slovak regardless. Nagyova explains how it works. “There were two people in the French and English booths with Greek and they just interpreted into English and into French, so my colleague worked then from French,” Nagyova explained. “So we do not work directly from the floor from the speaker, but via another language.”

This concept of a “relay” is one of the keys to unlocking the mystery of interpreting. While all interpreters are multilingual – Nagyova herself speaks five languages, others speak seven or eight – no one could hope understand everything. In fact, the real skill is speed: eing able to listen to what’s being said, translate it in your head and talk at the same time. In that sense there’s a huge difference between interpreting, which is oral, and translating, the written equivalent of transforming words into another language.

“There is also a different dynamic in it because when I worked as a translator I was a master of my time,” Nagyova said. “I did mainly books. It may be different with technical translations or translations for institutions where you also have this time pressure. But still, the time pressure is not comparable with what we have here.” “Plus, we say women can do many things at the same time, plus I am a twin in my head – always split – but I think it’s a matter of training, and probably also a talent,” she said.

For Nagyova, the biggest challenge – aside from people not switching on their microphones – is people who attempt to speak English, even when it is not their mother tongue. “English is so widespread now that everyone speaks English and everyone believes they speak proper English and that’s not true and sometimes we really have to decipher the language we hear, ” she said. More.

See: DW

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