When we see or hear a report of a peace summit, an international trade accord or a United Nations declaration on this, that or climate change, as well as the power players out in front, a uniquely skilled group of people is behind the scenes making it all possible. Conference interpreters equipped only with earpieces, microphones and their prodigious linguistic skills are hard at work putting words into people’s mouths.
Nicole Jamieson is a Paris-based New Zealander (pictured above) who has been doing this for 38 years. The job has given her special insights into some extraordinary events.
“When Russia invaded Ukraine,” she says, “I got a call at 5am saying, ‘Can you get down to the television studios? They need people to cover all of the footage that’s coming in.’”
So, as the images appeared, she was one of a team interpreting the accompanying words for the international audience.
“You had no idea who was going to pop up, whether it was going to be the head of Nato or the Italian prime minister. And there were no Ukrainian interpreters. They didn’t manage to find any until the next day.”
Things can go from the geopolitical to the personal and intimate in a heartbeat. “In the Ukrainian booth next to mine were two girls, and one of them suddenly burst into tears and went out. I went over and said, ‘Are you all right?’ She looked at me and said, ‘That’s my building that’s just been bombed. That’s where my family lives.’”
The name for Jamieson’s job is “conference interpreter”. She is not a translator. Translators have the luxury of time to choose their words. Specifically, she is a simultaneous interpreter, converting words from one language to another in real time.
The best compliment is when delegates say they forgot we were there.
There’s no career path as such for the occupation. It probably helped that Jamieson’s mother, Danielle Jamieson, was French and became the first French female full-time lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in French studies and literature.
“When I was 13, she sent my younger brother and me to France for a year. We had to go to school, and that’s when I learnt to speak French.”
Back home again, “I was very lucky because the French community in New Zealand was tiny when I was growing up. People gravitated to our house. When I was about 15, a French rowing team came over to some international regatta, and I ended up interpreting for them. I was destined to do languages.”
Except she really wanted to be a vet. “So I did science and chemistry and biology and maths, and I was just terrible at them all. The only thing I was good at was French. And then I took Italian, and I was good at Italian and I loved it.”
The day after she finished university in Auckland, armed with a BA in French and Italian, she left New Zealand. Her early OE included time as a bouncer at a ski resort, but eventually Jamieson found herself at interpreter school – and yes, there is such a thing. The schools don’t teach languages. You have to arrive fluent and you have to have at least a BA. “They don’t take anybody straight out of school because they’re just too young.”
To say it is rigorous and demanding is an understatement.
“At the school I went to, there were 37 of us in first year. Seven of us got through to second year. And two of us qualified. It’s a two-year course but most people take three because they have to repeat a year.”
And how exactly did those two get taught their arcane specialty? Mainly, “it’s like doing scales on the piano or any musical instrument. Hours and hours of sitting in a booth and trying to the best of your ability to interpret either somebody reading a text or doing a speech to you. It’s just practice, practice, practice.”
In her first few years, Jamieson worked pretty much exclusively for the European Parliament and the European Commission in Brussels and in Luxembourg. “I was doing meetings on every possible subject under the sun.”
Anything goes
No subject is off limits. One day she might be called in to take care of Renée Zellweger’s side of an interview for French TV promoting the new Bridget Jones movie, the next she might be doing a site inspection with reinsurers, the people who provide insurance to insurance companies.
So many specialised industries, so much specialist vocabulary and rote learning.
“The Fishing Commission in the European Parliament is one of the worst ones. You have hundreds of names of fish, and they are not the same from one language to another.” In her home office she has thousands of pages of vocabulary lists she has compiled for all the topics she might have to cover.
During the week, Jamieson bases herself in Paris, keeping a small apartment in a quiet part of town off the beaten tourist track. Though well equipped with boulangeries, boucheries and brasseries, the 14th arrondissement has the nondescript privacy that residents of this overcrowded city value highly.
An end of the L-shaped living room serves as her office, shelves piled high with voluminous background papers, reference books and those vocabulary lists she’s compiled for various assignments. Non-working days are spent in the Loire Valley, where she and husband Bruno Dumolard, a retired marketing director, have a house.
Her skill has given her front-row seats and backstage passes to locations that are off limits to regular folk. “You end up having guided tours of places tourists never, ever see, like the basement of the Louvre, where things are being repaired or stored.”
Somewhat less romantically, “you get to visit oil rigs and pipelines on risk inspections, the Stade de France, alcohol silos or continuous copper casting plants, because you’re with engineers and chemists who are checking to see what could possibly go wrong were there to be an earthquake that hit this particular site”.
In the Ukrainian booth next to mine were two girls, and one suddenly burst into tears.
Change is a constant. “As the European Union has got larger, they’ve added languages. When the Finns first joined, there were no Finnish interpreters. The first ones who came in were two elderly gentlemen who would do Finnish into English, and all of the other booths would do a relay. In the English booth, we could work back from the Finns’ English. The Italian, German and Spanish booths were taking that English and working it into Italian, German and Spanish.”
Bad enough. But then there are the multiple relays. “Once, somebody spoke Russian, and the only person who understood Russian was a girl in the Greek booth. So she was doing Russian into Greek. We didn’t have anybody who had either Russian or Greek. But I had Italian. And there was a girl in the Italian booth who understood Greek. So the Russian was going into Greek, the Greek was going into Italian, and I was listening to the Italian and doing it into English.”
What is going on in her head while she works? No one is quite sure. The neurological mechanics of simultaneous interpretation are relatively under-researched. Jamieson says she doesn’t really understand it herself, though she does know a few things.
For instance, she is left-eared. She takes in the words through an earpiece in her left ear, turns them from French into English or English into French, and she uses her right ear to overhear what’s coming out of her mouth and “make sure that my sentences are complete, as elegant as possible and that I haven’t made any mistakes.”
She has tried using her right ear to take in the foreign language but it doesn’t work. Her colleagues report they, too, always rely on only one ear.
Over time, her hearing has become better in her left ear, and her brain has developed other unusual skills. “After a few years, I realised I could, while working, start thinking on another level that was up a bit in my brain, thinking about what I’m saying and what I’m going to say and trying to find a word.” While the interpreting goes on, that part of her brain is going though “mental drawers”, perhaps for a word she knows and needs to find but wasn’t expecting.
“All of a sudden, in a financial meeting on urban planning, they’ve come up with architectural terms for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame. I haven’t prepared that, so this second level in my brain is busy shuffling through my drawers to find the right term. Meanwhile, I’m still working and I’m still listening to myself.”
She also has a mental pause button. Names and, especially, numbers can’t be remembered, so she has to write them down when they come up. At the same time, she can’t afford to miss any of the speech, so the words that are being spoken while she is writing are tucked away in another part of her brain. When she finishes writing down the number or name, she can “retrieve” the words she has missed and catch up with the speaker.
Moving up a level, “I have another layer in my brain that is my personal private layer that takes a step back. It’s like people talking about near-death experiences, where they step out of their bodies and can see themselves from above. I can listen to myself from behind. And that’s a layer that doesn’t interfere with these other two that are working.”
Hard work? The stress level has been compared to that of an air traffic controller.
“When we’re working in simultaneous we do half hours, or 20 minutes if it’s very, very difficult. There are three of us. If you do half an hour and your concentration is 100% then you need an hour to recover. Go outside, take a breath of fresh air, go to the toilet, have a cup of coffee and then come back and listen, so that you don’t miss what’s going on.”
It also helps to be invisible. “The best compliment is when delegates say they forgot we were there.”
As well as all that brain work, the heart has a part to play. Empathy is crucial.
“Interpretation is not just a question of communication. We’re there to make the connections that need to be made between different parties.”
Which is why, she says, AI with all its brain power will never be able to do her job.
“You cannot have a machine that will give you a good interpretation unless you have a conference where you have one person who’s going to speak a very scripted speech with excellent sound, no interruptions from the audience and no jokes or puns or proverbs. Half of our job is to read body language and facial expressions, to know when they’re taking the mickey, when they are angry, when they’re being sarcastic, when they’re being ironic, when things are going to escalate out of hand. A computer can’t get the nuances and the ulterior motives and the emotion that’s flickering over that person’s face.”
Fish out of water
Jamieson’s relationship with her home country is complex. “I returned almost every year for at least six weeks till around 2002, when it became too difficult to take my daughter, Tess, out of French school. Then it was just the odd visit and I haven’t been back for about 15 years now.”
One reason she stopped coming was that she liked it too much. “When I go back to New Zealand I keep thinking, ‘Why on earth did I ever leave?’ Everything is easy compared to what we live through here, but what I live through here is so interesting. When I go back to New Zealand, I feel like a fish out of water. I can’t fit into New Zealand conversations. After a while I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Stop doing it. Your life is here, your career is here, your family is here.’ It’s been easier since I’ve done that.”
But in a way, Aotearoa has come to her with the noticeable increase in the use of te reo Māori. Jamieson worked with the New Zealand Army on World War I centennial commemorations in France in 2018.
“All the speeches, all of the prayers would be in both languages. It was quite new to have this, because that wasn’t what I was used to in the past at all.” Since then, she’s been attuned to te reo, creating one of her vocab lists for reference.
“All the New Zealanders who come over here are more and more slipping in Māori words.”
Her work has given her a powerful sense of private connection with public events. One of her most memorable experiences was at a state dinner in Paris near the start of her career.
“It was just after Nelson Mandela had been freed from prison, and he was being hosted by [Ivory Coast president] Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who was the most corrupt leader you’ve ever seen.
“Mandela was there. Frederik de Klerk, who was the president of South Africa at the time, was there. Henry Kissinger was there with his wife. And I was there as a very young interpreter.
“It was just the most wondrous awakening to the size of the world and the sheer difference of characters and destinies of people and the fact that nothing is ever as it seems. Houphouët-Boigny fell asleep during the state dinner, so I had to contend with his little sniffling snores as I was working.”
Jamieson was taken by surprise when de Klerk asked her what he was eating. She had not thought to look at the menu but guessed it was seaweed. Later, she found out it was a truffle salad.
“I said, ‘I’m very sorry. I made a mistake before. You are not eating seaweed. You are actually eating truffle salad.’ And then I said, ‘The seaweed comes after.’ And he cracked up laughing and said, ‘Where are you from? New Zealand?’ And his face lit up and he said, ‘Henry, we’ve got a Kiwi here. We’re going to thrash you in the next Rugby World Cup.’ And we had a 10-minute conversation about rugby, between Kissinger and de Klerk, and I sat there thinking, ‘Is this me?’”
It wasn’t all about food and the footie. “At one point de Klerk said to Kissinger, ‘Henry, how much time have I got?’ And Kissinger thought for a bit and said, ‘My friend, I give you a year. You have a year to push through all these anti-apartheid reforms, and then you will be out. And you will be forgotten.’ And that’s exactly what happened. Mandela became president and nobody remembers FW de Klerk. It’s like the disappearance of Gorbachev.”
Other names have also had a big impact on Jamieson. “Back in the early 90s, through work, I had a private lunch with Giovanni Falcone, the anti-terrorist judge in Italy. And two years later he was [blown up]. And the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in a lift – I’d worked for her three weeks before that.
“I worked for Alexei Navalny’s wife twice, when she came to the Council of Europe pleading for something to be done. And then, of course, he died. How can you not feel connected? And how can you not want the people around you to feel that connection? I think, that’s what we’re there for.”