BFM live simultaneous interpretation
BFM commissioned Atenao, the multilingual communication agency, to provide the French interpretation for Igor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv and guest on Le Live Toussaint on Wednesday April 20th.
Translating or interpreting war is one of the toughest assignments for professional translators and interpreters. Our job is all about bringing people and cultures together, encouraging communication and understanding; it’s an industry that’s meant to empower peace and harmony.
In her book “Guerre et traduction: représenter et traduire la guerre”, Lynne Franjié explores how translators can contribute to peace when caught up in the turmoil of war. To what extent can professional translators be pacifists or peacemakers? If they have no hold on the reality of war, is “textual peace” possible at least?
Our task changes in the midst of war to make us representatives of opinions who must not stray from the original words given the gravity of interpretation errors. Just take “mokusatsu”, the mistranslation that changed the course of history.
Wartime interpreting is extremely technical and requires the utmost accuracy to the detriment of any form of transcreation or stylistic devices.
Aside from the context of war which leaves no room for error, the biggest challenge of BFM’s assignment for Atenao to simultaneously interpret the mayor of Kharkiv’s speech from Ukrainian to French, was translating a high volume of words live, with no advance preparation, plan or knowledge of the subjects to be addressed. It was like a leap in the dark war.
We venture that our translation gave Le Live Toussaint’s audience a real insight into the events described by Igor Terekhov.