Don't ask for the notes and testimony of Trump's interpreter at the Putin meeting

In the wake of the New York Times story last Saturday about a national security investigation of a sitting president and whether he was working for a foreign power, a great hue and cry has arisen about the interpreter's notes from a Trump meeting with Putin, demands for an explanation of why they were destroyed, and undoubtedly there will soon be demands that the interpreter testify as to the contents of the conversation.

Me (left) as defense interpreter at the Managua trial of
American aviator of fortune Eugene Hasenfus in 1986.
Foreground: CIA weapons for the counter-revolution.

I am an interpreter. I have been for more than half a century if you count informal settings when I was still in high school. Professionally (getting paid for it) since the early 1970s. In the 1990s, at CNN en Español, I recruited and led the first team of full-time broadcast interpreters ever, at least that I know of.

In my lifetime, I have interpreted in person for many government officials including heads of state; at God knows how many conferences and meetings; during innumerable privileged conversations such as those between an accused client and their lawyer or between doctors and patients, and of participants in live news events.

And I have never preserved my notes. Ever.

There are two concerns that make the idea of asking for an interpreter's notes or testimony objectionable. The first is ethical.

An interpreter is not a party to a conversation, a negotiation, or any sort of proceeding. They are an extension of the speaker. A piece of their tongue. Part of their larynx. An interpreter is not separate from the speaker. We are a prosthetic device that allows the speaker's vocal chords to do what they otherwise could not do. Ideally, any doubt by a speaker in their interpreter should be as unimaginable as the trust they have in their own mouth saying what they think they are saying on account of, well, it's their mouth.

The second concern is practical, and it is difficult to describe to someone who is not an interpreter.

Our job is to convey as clearly and accurately as we can the plain content and meaning of the speaker, preserving the tone and register of the  utterance. We do not "translate" words. Our job starts where words end.

We convey meaning -- but not just the literal meaning, but whether the tone was respectful, even ceremonial, whether it was just everyday normal or even downright contemptuous. We use the same linguistic "register," because the way you speak in the courtroom is different from the classroom and is again different from a boy's high school locker room. Which one is used is up to the speaker, and the interpreter replicates it because even at this level, the medium is the message.

Doing that requires an extraordinary focus on the immediate task at hand, which means that neither the interpreter's notes nor the interpreter's recollections are reliable for any purpose after the fact.

Interpreting requires you to be conscious of the context, the overall conversation, yet it prevents you from absorbing its overall message, meaning or import. What an interpreter most remembers --at least this interpreter-- are the things that proved most challenging.

The single moment I most remember as a  broadcast interpreter at CNN is "Hail Mary Play." This was in 1991, towards the end of a speech by General H. Norman Schwartzkopf after the First Gulf War describing the tactics of the military forces opposing Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. As I remember it, I had absolutely no clue what it could possibly mean and God knows how I muddled through in the middle of a live broadcast.

I just looked for it on the Internet, and found it.

Looks like it was not a speech, but a military briefing. It was not after the war but on the second or third day of a ground campaign that had been preceded by weeks of air attacks. It was not at the end of the hour-long event but towards the beginning, 5-1/2 minutes after he started. And my panic must have lasted at most a second or two, because the general immediately explained the "Hail Mary" reference. It came after he said that by knocking out the its air force, the U.S. had blinded Iraq's military:

Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what could best be described as the Hail Mary play in football. I think you recall, when the quarterback is desperate for a touchdown at the very end, what he does is, he steps up behind the center, and all of a sudden every single one of his receivers goes way out to one flank, and they all run down the field as fast as they possibly can and into the end zone, and he lobs the ball. In essence that's what we did [ map 2 ] . When we knew he couldn't see us any more, we did a massive movement of troops all the way out to the west, to the extreme west ...

That redeployment was not small. It involved two armored corps (huge tank-heavy formations) and a couple of extra divisions (one a French division, the other the 101st airborne). I think the last time forces on this scale had been deployed for an actual operation that was then carried out had been during the Second World War.

There really was no ambiguity. This was all accompanied by very detailed maps and charts on an easel next to the general, there simply was no way for an interpreter to get lost. I'm trying to figure out now why my panic then, because by then I'd been an interpreter for presidents and ministers and mercenaries, not just played one on TV. And on the war biz, I'd been a war correspondent covering an actual war (a civil war in Nicaragua) and had actually become familiar with all sorts of things military. So you'd think that I would have had the confidence by then to believe that even when thrown a curve ball, I'd muddle through.

But what I remember is the "Hail Mary Play" panic. The leap into the void because there was no choice, you had to take the next step even though you knew there was not going to be anything solid underneath your feet when  you took that step. And what you don't remember is that in fact there was something solid there, the ground continued just like before.

So that's my point. The interpreter's recollections are dominated by their subjective experience, the highlights and challenges of a particular session to them and to their job.

You might say, well, that was almost 30 years ago.

But I've recounted this same anecdote, about my panic at the end of Schwartzkopf's speech, dozens of times beginning, I am sure, while the memory of the event was still fresh in everyone's mind. Back then I might have been more precise that it was towards the end of the war, not after, but the heart of it would have been the same: I had no idea what it meant or how to interpret it on air and thus crashed and burned most spectacularly.

I did not realize when I started to write this post that this event that I knew I would use as an illustration would turn out to be a much more convincing proof of my point than I imagined. What I actually remember is that in the flow of my work as an interpreter, there was a moment --an instant-- of absolute, heart-attack panic, and therefore my memory of it was unreliable. I did not know that the Internet would absolutely prove it beyond even an unreasonable doubt.

Imagine that fraction-of-a-second panic in a private meeting between the two people that control nuclear arsenals so vast that even the cockroaches might not survive if unleashed. And then Congress and the public being told the single most outstanding moment of the meeting according to the only other American present had been ... say ...

"Fuck the cockroaches," which  Trump said sending the interpreter into such a panic about how coarse the Russian version that later, when you ask about it, the linguist has completely forgotten that our guy's next words were "what I really care about is people not being harmed."

OK, not bloody likely with our Donald, but still ...

--José G. Pérez