TRANSLATORS, AUTHORS OF CONFUSION
A lot of cases require witnesses
whose English language skills are weak, or non-existent. The obvious remedy is a translator. The flaw is that translation is not always accurate, especially simultaneous translation. This may be why diplomacy is so
futile. Languages are idiomatic. Groups
of words do not mean the same thing as their literal translation. Consider, “He
is used to cream in his coffee.”
Versus “A wrench is used to tighten
nut” Translation is so difficult that
in both World Wars the U.S.
used Native Americans speaking in their Native language to baffle enemy
intelligence.
In W.W.I General
Pershing suspected that the Germans had tapped his telephone lines, and broken
the codes. He assigned Ojibwa Indians to
transmit telephone messages in the Ojibwa language. The Germans officers did not speak Ojibwa and
did not catch on. The only problem was
that too many military terms did not have an Ojibwa equivalent.
In W.W.II the
effort was much more organized. Radio
voice communication was efficient, but not secure. Encryption was secure most of the time, but
painfully tedious. Hundreds of Navajo
were organized as Code Talkers. They
made up codes within their language for military terms and other critical
words. Various airplanes, for example
took on the names of birds; ships, fish etc.
None of the code was written down, but instead was passed on through
oral methods similar to those traditions used to preserve tribal history. A Navajo who was not initiated could not have
usefully translated their messages, and none of their messages were ever
understood by the Japanese. In addition
they had the distinct advantage of being simultaneously translated instead of
laboriously encrypted. What took
cryptologists four hours, code talkers could do in two and a half minutes. Sometimes the code talker could just describe
what he saw without having it written then encrypted before it could be sent.
In both wars, the
Code Talkers were fluent in both languages, and participating members of both
cultures.
The court
translator needs to be as fluent in each language as the questioners and
answerers are in their individual languages, including slang, technical terms
and jargon. Usually they are not. Fortunately lawyers always speak in plain
simple grammar school English. (Yeah
right) English has twice as many words
as any other language, at least 600,000.
This is why the Navajo code talkers had to make up expressions in
Navajo. At the other extreme Pidgin, the
official language of Papua
New Guinea has only a few thousand. In Pidgin for example there is no name for a
piano you could say “bigpella box many teeth alla same you bang ‘em he cry out”. A translator who learned his Pidgin where
there were no pianos might not translate that as piano. And who is to say every Pigin speaker would
describe a piano the same way?
I have learned to
tell from the transcript if a translator was used, even if it is not
noted. Certain words are repeatedly
misused, for example door for gate, because in Spanish they are both La
Puerta. In a deposition of a Lao witness
to a traffic accident the testimony became very confused about lines and
lanes. Finally the translator remarked
that in the witness’s language, line and lane were the same word. A quick thinking attorney suggested a
synonym; stripe for line and the deposition proceeded smoothly. You would think a competent translator would
have noticed the problem, but, obviously, she was working by rote, as they
often do because translators seldom have the technical vocabulary of the
witness.
A deposition of a
truck driver proceeded for an hour with the driver making repeated reference to
the “tar”. Finally one attorney said “I
don't see any tar in that photo.” The
driver, from North Carolina
said “thet tar” and pointed to the left front tire.
In a series of
depositions regarding an accident on a tuna boat all hardware on the boat was
simply “an iron.” The Captain who spoke
English referred to cleats, chocks, blocks, davits, and winches, but in the
transcripts of translated depositions none of those words appear, just “iron”. Every crewman spoke a different language, and
for a long time I wondered how they communicated, and if it mattered since
everything was simply an iron anyway. If
the Samoan or the Portuguese said “chock,” or the equivalent the translator did
not recognize that word in that language, and asked for an explanation. No doubt the explanation included that it was
metal, so it became an “iron”. If the Hawaiian
or Mexican said cleat, it became an “iron,” and so on. You would think the translator would have at
least said “iron thing” so the ambiguity would be obvious.
One solution would
be for each party to bring their own translator to the proceeding, just as we
saw with Bush and Gorbachev. Our firm
did that once in a case involving an imported forklift. Our client’s German engineer came here for a
deposition. As a precaution we provided
an engineer, who had worked in both countries and was thus fluent in
engineering terminology in both cultures, to verify the translations. After only 45 minutes the deposition was
terminated because the translations were unrelated to the engineers answers. The German-American housewife court approved
translator could carry on a domestic conversation in either language, but the
engineering terms meant nothing to her.
Our engineer got qualified as a court translator the next day, and the
deposition was completed the following day.
I can understand
this from my own experience talking to a Mexican mechanic through a
translator. We were examining a concrete
pump in Mexico
that had been involved in a local amputation accident. I asked him to show me the accumulator, which
the interpreter dutifully translated as accumulador. We were met with a blank stare. I drew the simplest of schematic sketches, an
upright oval with a line sticking out of the bottom. His face lit up he said "Oh, La
bottella hydraulico," (the
hydraulic bottle), and led me right to it.
American engineers and mechanics often say “accumulator bottle” a
reasonably descriptive term.
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