Found in Translation

Of Diplomats and Dialects
When you think of international diplomacy, chances are you think of heads of
state and foreign ministers shaking hands, exchanging gifts, and discussing
issues that matter to the countries they represent. But for all of those meetings
to happen, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes. Just ask the U.S.
Department of State (DOS), which maintains diplomatic relations between the
United States and all sovereign countries, except Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, North
Korea, and Taiwan. The DOS has eighteen thousand employees working in the
Civil and Foreign Services alone. Logically, language plays a pretty important
role in most foreign relations—and it has since 1781, when the Continental
Congress hired its first translators.
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Many of America’s Founding Fathers,
such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, relied on translators and
interpreters.
For the document translation team at the State Department, there is never a
dull moment. For example, whenever treaty negotiations take place, translators
are there—either at the scene or behind the scenes—helping draft language that
will be acceptable to both sides. They serve as linguistic experts, much in the
same way attorneys from both sides serve as legal experts, to ensure that the
terms mean exactly what they are meant to mean.
“It’s an adrenaline rush,” states Joseph Mazza, the department’s translating
division chief. “We joke that as a translator, you’re all-powerful for fifteen
minutes, because everyone is looking to you to make a decision. It’s something
you train for your entire career. All eyes are on you.”
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The nuances of a
single word are debated. Drafts go back and forth. Discussions become heated
and simmer down. And when a treaty is finally reached, all parties can breathe
a sigh of relief. “It’s a huge undertaking,” observes Mazza, who manages a
team of hundreds of freelance translators and a core staff of about twenty full-
time in-house translators.
But treaties are just one of the many types of communications that the DOS
translation team handles. Virtually any document that comes into the

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department in another language must be translated, including those in less
common tongues. For example, Mazza recalls when President Obama received
a letter from the king of Bhutan. The letter was written in Dzongkha, a
language his team had never translated before due to the infrequency of
official dealings with the country.
After searching high and low, Mazza and his team located a Dzongkha-
language specialist. Unfortunately, after reviewing the text, the Dzongkha
translator declined the job—for a surprising reason: The letter was evidently
written not just in Dzongkha, but in Royal Dzongkha. “He told us that his eyes
were not fit to read His Majesty’s royal language,” Mazza recalls. Eventually,
the department located someone who found another translator, who was able to
report that the letter contained greetings for a happy new year.
Of course, not all of the letters that come across the translation team’s desk
are so positive. “One of the jobs of my office is to screen all the mail that
private citizens send to senior U.S. officials in other languages and summarize
it wherever possible,” Mazza explains. The letters span a wide range, from
people professing their love to citizens writing in to request things like
tractors, sometimes complete with photos. Sometimes, letters include threats to
the president or the secretary of state. “When a threat comes in, it’s an
adrenaline rush of a different kind,” he says. One of the more challenging parts
of translating such letters is that they are often erratic and difficult to
understand even in the source language. “It can be hard to follow the thread of
what they are saying, but at the same time, you don’t want to miss any clues that
could be useful to investigators.”
And then there are those important speeches, such as Obama’s 2009 address
to the international Muslim community, which was translated into more than
two dozen languages. In addition to new languages, Mazza explains that with
the Obama administration came a new focus on social media. His department
began to translate streaming video captions into other languages, among many
new projects. More than ever before, the nations of the world are engaging in
one conversation.