What’s it like to interpret for Gorbachev, Ahmadinejad or Deng Xiaoping? Luke Harding hears about rows, headphone malfunctions – and which US president always carried notes

There are few professions that offer a front-row seat to history, or a chance to rub shoulders with world leaders, as well as the odd tyrant. Interpreting is one of them, and it is interpreters who have given us some of the 20th century’s best phrases. The Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, who died in May, aged 81, famously rendered Nikita Khrushchev‘s threat to the west, made during his first visit to the US in 1959, as “We will bury you”. (What Khrushchev actually said was, “Communism will outlast capitalism,” but it was the more brutal, and not entirely accurate, phrase that stuck.)

Typically interpreters spend their days “in the booth”. This means sitting in a soundproof cubicle, wearing a headset, listening to their own voice, one ear covered and the other ear slightly covered. They work in same-language pairs. Each does a stint of 30 minutes because “after an hour your brain explodes,” one says. That simultaneous interpreting should be possible seems something of a human miracle. “I still don’t know how I can listen and speak at the same time. There is something happening in my brain I can’t understand,” I was told.

Like acting, the best interpreters capture the personality of the person who is speaking: the emotion of Ahmadinejad, or the sardonic deadpan of Putin. (This doesn’t signify approval, merely a fidelity of rendition.) Interpreters strive for the idiomatic rather than the literal; as one puts it, “You have your favourite synonyms and idioms, like pocket change.” More.

See: The Guardian