Translators have often played vital roles through history. Sometimes their words make a big difference
ABC Radio National /
By Sarah Scopelianos and Julie Street for Late Night Live
Posted Yesterday at 5:30amThu 12 Aug 2021 at 5:30am
Getty: Bettmann Archive)
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When the Allies sent Japan a stiffly worded ultimatum demanding its surrender to end the war in the Pacific in 1945, they eagerly awaited the response.
It wasn't quite what they expected.
After Japan's initial official silence to the Potsdam Declaration — issued by the US, Britain, China and the Soviet Union on July 26, 1945 — the country's prime minister Kantaro Suzuki then made a statement to reporters about the declaration without rejecting its terms. He added that Japan must "mokusatsu" it.
Supplied: US National Archives)
The Allies, who had warned of "prompt and utter destruction" if Japan rejected unconditional surrender, found themselves pondering the meaning of "mokusatsu". When literally translated, it means "kill with silence".
Perhaps that translation contributed to the country's fate. On July 30, 1945, the New York Times reported that Japan had turned down the surrender ultimatum and within days the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Historian Anna Aslanyan said Suzuki later told his son he meant to say "no comment".
"Incredibly, the Japanese language ... does not have a direct equivalent for this expression," she told ABC RN's Late Night Live.
Supplied: US National Archives)
"So faced with this untranslatable word, the Americans translated it as 'ignore' and sometimes even [as] 'treat with silent contempt'."
An unclassified US National Security Agency technical journal article from 1968 states whoever "decided to translate 'mokusatsu' by one meaning (even though that is the first definition in the dictionary) and didn't add a note that the word might also mean nothing stronger than 'to withhold comment' did a horrible disservice to the people who read his translation".
Aslanyan said this "mistranslation" cast "a long historical shadow" and serves as an important lesson for current-day translators.
She was quick to add: "Of course a historian would tell you that the tragedy was never caused by this mistranslation alone."
Making words 'stink a little less'
According to Aslanyan, translators, who are often ordinary citizens, find themselves playing key roles during big moments in history.
The Russian-English interpreter and translator researched the profession's history from the Ottoman Empire and its technical advances through to the current debate about Western forces abandoning local translators for her book Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History.
Translating written works and interpreting spoken words are highly specialised tasks involving languages skills and detecting cultural nuances.
Aslanyan said while some translators strive to be "invisible", others believe in "agency".
"A translator can be invisible when necessary and take initiative on other occasions."
Often meanings hinge on "different interpretations of words", she said, because there's "no direct or most accurate translation" between the languages.
In essence, a translator's main concern is not the word itself but conveying its meaning.
This means translators sometimes have to get creative. This was the case when they were trying to explain the phrase "shithole countries" used by US president Donald Trump during a meeting on immigration protections in 2018.
Getty Images: Chip Somodevilla)
"Translators the world over decided to take it upon themselves to mitigate this horrible definition," Aslanyan said.
In Taiwan, it became "countries where birds do no lay eggs"; in Japan it was "countries that are dirty like toilets"; while in Germany the vulgar term became "garbage dumps".
"I think they were right [to do it]. We will never know whether the fate of the world would have been different otherwise but when translators decided to make this expression stink a bit less, the world began to make a little bit more sense," Aslanyan said.
Technology at the greatest trial in history
Making sense of the world has long fallen to translators.
"Translators and interpreters were in fact the unsung and sometimes misunderstood heroes of the Nuremberg trials," she said.
After World War II, the Allied nations agreed to prosecute Nazi war criminals in a series of trials. The defendants included Nazi Party officials, high-ranking military officers, German industrialists, lawyers and doctors.
To help onlookers and speed up the process, it was decided that simultaneous interpretations were needed instead of the stop-and-start method of the consecutive mode. That mode involved a witness speaking and then stopping for the interpreter to repeat it in another language.
Supplied: US National Archives and Records Administration)
"They had to be conducted simultaneously in four languages: German, English, Russian and French," Aslanyan said.
State-of-the-art equipment known as the International Translator System, which included miles of cable, hundreds of headphones and dozens of switch boxes, arrived five days before the first trial. It was all donated by IBM.
Headphones were available at every seat in the court and attendees from around the world could select the language they wanted to hear.
Thirteen trials ran between 1945 and 1949. Over that time, 36 interpreters worked in shifts to cover the court proceedings.
Some of the interpreters were recruited from the Paris telephone exchange because they were known for switching easily between languages.
"Today this UN-style meeting where interpreters are in their booths, wearing headsets, pressing buttons, it might not seem as anything particularly exciting but it was an exotic sight in 1945," Aslanyan said.
She said the technology had been tested in 1927 at the International Labour Conference in Geneva and was rolled out to "its full capacity" at Nuremberg.
In total, 199 defendants were tried during the trials, 161 were convicted and 37 were sentenced to death.
German-to-English translator Ernest Peter Uiberall, who became chief interpreter at the trials, described the proceedings as a horrible experience.
"You didn't have time to think about the content," he said, "but it came back to you in your sleep, in nightmares."
What does the future hold?
There have been many technological advancements in this field, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI), but Aslanyan said she isn't losing sleep over it.
"Computer-assisted translation has existed for decades [and] if that means that we human translators can delegate some technical tasks, so much the better."
For Aslanyan, "as long as people continue joking and swearing, praising and ironising" there will always be a need for translators to interpret language and culture.
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