Found in Translation

particularly uncharacteristic expression for a president who was known for his
deeply held religious convictions. The Polish press had a field day with the
comments, and once the U.S. media got wind of it, so did they. (President
Carter took the incident in stride, and Seymour went on to have a distinguished
career as a translator—in Russian, not Polish.)
The Ke nne dy Mistranslation Myth
In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech after the Berlin Wall was erected to express
solidarity with the citizens of Berlin. His few words of German—“Ich bin ein Berliner,” which
means “I am a Berliner”—made an immediate impact on his audience. But rumors soon began to
spread that Kennedy had botched the grammar and mistakenly called himself a jelly donut also
known as a Berliner. In fact, his sentence was grammatically correct, and his German-speaking
listeners knew that he was not referring to the pastry. Robert Lochner, who helped Kennedy write
the speech, was a chief German interpreter during World War II. Kennedy had also practiced the
speech in front of many Germans, including Willy Brandt, the mayor of Berlin. In this case, there
was no mistranslation.
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506 Language Pairs for the Price of a Cup of Coffee
As the writer Umberto Eco observed, “The language of Europe is translation.”
Indeed, there are quite a few languages spoken by the 736 members of the
European Parliament who serve the European Union (EU). How do they
communicate? Through interpreters, of course. The EU is the largest
transnational democratic electorate in the world, and it handles a mind-
boggling number of languages and assignments. The twenty-three languages
spoken by the members of the parliament are Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene,
Spanish, and Swedish.
While twenty-three languages might not sound like much, when you
consider all of the potential combinations (Swedish into Greek, Danish into
Estonian, French into Maltese, and so on), this means that interpreting services
must be provided in 506 different language combinations. In addition, they
also provide interpreters for nonofficial languages when needed, such as
Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Farsi, and Turkish.
Interpreting for the European Parliament is challenging not just because of
the words that must be converted from one language into another but because
the interpreters have to pay attention to things like context, innuendo, and body
language. Not only that, but sometimes the content can be difficult to interpret

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or even embarrassing. After all, political debates can get extremely heated. At a
meeting of the European Parliament in 2003, Silvio Berlusconi compared
Martin Schultz, a German member of the Parliament, to a Nazi. “I know that in
Italy there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps,”
Berlusconi said. “I shall put you forward for the role of kapo—you would be
perfect.” (The term kapo refers to a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who
was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out
administrative tasks in the camp.) Just imagine the reaction of the interpreter
who had to convey these offensive words in German to Schultz.
How many people does it take to make all this interpreting happen? The
European Parliament has twenty-two linguistic units, 344 staff interpreters, and
150 support staff. At a single plenary session in Strasbourg in 2011, there were
more than a thousand interpreters on hand. (Not all of them were full-time staff
interpreters. Some were brought in just for the event.) In total, the interpreters
for the European Parliament delivered 87,400 interpretation days in 2009 and
109,667 in 2010.
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Olga Cosmidou, who oversees the Directorate-General for Interpretation
and Conferences, is at the helm of these activities. The interpreting is
impressive in terms of both volume and impact. Many members of the
parliament simply cannot communicate without interpreters.
Yet even though interpreters are essential for the parliament to actually do its
work, people are sometimes quick to complain about the costs. Olga shrugs off
the criticism. “It’s the cost of democracy,” she says. How much does it cost
exactly? About €2.3 per citizen per year, or less than an average cup of coffee.
If you ask us, that’s pretty good value for money.