The Translator as Interrogator

[Bubba]

All right, I recently spent three days in the British Public Records Office in Kew, flipping desperately through stacks of yellowing papers in search of particular information, dating from the Second World War, that I didn't find. But I did come across some interesting stuff in my researches: One file from Eighth Army headquarters (the HQ of the Anglo-American army fighting northwards up the Italian peninsula) consisted almost entirely of complaints about the inadequacy and downright incompetence of the translators and interpreters, both Italian and English, assigned to headquarters. Another, a War Office or Special Operations Executive file (I can't remember which), contained several "interrogation reports" signed by one "Archie" Colquhoun, who, as you can see here, later happened to translate to English several Italian classics, including The Leopard, de Roberto's The Viceroys, and Rigoni Stern's excellent war memoir The Sergeant in the Snow.

At the same time, I couldn't help but wonder if, twenty years hence, from the ranks of the armies of the Coalition of the Willing, there might not emerge, tempered by fire and steel, a cadre of literary translators determined to make known to the world the glories of that hotbed of literary and cultural ferment that is Sadr City! Will the future translators of Pashto literature have spent the early years of the new millennium interrogating Talib insurgents?

[Eric]

The basic problem is that Brits are too bloody idle to learn foreign languages. Then suddenly there's a war, and they're all running around like blue-arsed flies looking for people who have any knowledge of the language of the enemy (like Krautspeak in the 1940s - the one that the humanist aesthetes Goethe and Mann shared with a bunch of genocidal maniacs). Loads of the enemy see this as rather a good opportunity to do a spot of infiltration.

The problem when recruiting interrogators is, no doubt (it's not one of my hobbies), that there aren't enough indigenous Brits who know all those languages spoken by the naughty boys. So in the case of Iran, should a war break out between the West and the Ahmedi-Nejad Club of Great Decency, the Brits will probably find that half the people they've recruited to do the verbal bit of the interrogation procedure are totally unknown with regard to trustworthiness. In other words, for all we know, they might have rowed across the channel and lived on false papers for years, and are now going to join Her Majesty's jolly upright "intelligence" (I use this word with caution) services so they can send info back to Tehran.

So I think the problem is the other way round to the way Bubba stated it. If there are five or ten indigenous Brits who were cerebrally analysing Ancient Persian poetry, they will now be locked in a room in Cheltenham to translate tedious transcripts of present-day Farsi, of which they have little knowledge, into Britspeak.

Yours cynically, etc.