Enter full Colonel, United States Army, chest covered in impressive fruit salad (medals). Colonel casts approving glance upon virginal note pad on Frank’s desk, winces at Hill’s un-interrupted, frenzied activity. Obviously familiar with British badges of rank, he casts a glance at Frank’s three ‘pips’ and beckons him to follow. Outside office, he introduces himself:
‘I am Colonel Dostert.’[1] This was said in English with a thick, French accent, ‘and I am in charge of the language division here for the US Army. Come to my office weeese me, please.’
I hadn’t a clue what this was all about. We pushed through a dense crowd of very busy people in an anteroom, some of them snapping to the American version of attention. I noticed that the office had a carpet. I was mixing with the haute-volee (VIPs), obviously – and then I saw it: Army Form (questionnaire) 17X49B/31 (94), dated sometime in 1940, truthfully completed by me. ‘Wherever, Sir, did you get THAT?’ I gasped. He then explained:
Dostert was President Eisenhower’s English/French interpreter and a good friend. When ‘Ike’ had first become aware of the plans for bringing the top Nazis to trial he had tried to picture how the language problem could be solved. He had, understandably, had moments of irritation in the face of consecutive interpretations, in his activities as top commander.
‘Surely, Leon,’ the conversation between Ike and Dostert had run, ‘this means if a guy says something in German, some other guy has to translate it into English?’
‘Yes, General, and somebody else has to translate it into French, and somebody else into Russian… and if a guy says something in Russian that has to be translated into English, and into French, and into German.’
The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces was pacing the floor.
‘Holy Mackerel, Leon,’ he commanded ‘You gotta do something.’
And simultaneous interpretation was born.
Dostert had taught languages at the University of New York. His mind had always been preoccupied with the subject of simultaneous interpretation. We will shortly hear what it involves. Heretofore in every sphere of life – diplomacy, industry, science and all other areas, interpretation had always been done consecutively. There had been attempts at the League of Nations, to accelerate these translations by doing them all at the same time via the required number of channels after the orator had finished, but nothing had come of it.
Leon Dostert had always wanted to create a system whereby the words of a speaker would be translated into another language as they were being spoken. However, the opportunity and the means were lacking – now, here it was. He had Ike’s support, he would do it, and he did.
He sat in on the negotiations to set up the trial of the major war criminals. When the statesmen, the jurists, the historians and the military had had their say he raised his point as follows:
‘If the trials were to hold water,’ he said, ‘it would be necessary that anything said in one language would have to be translated, verbatim, into the other languages used in the courtroom; English, French, Russian and German. This meant three repetitions, in three languages, of every sentence spoken during the trial. It meant that every written statement, every written exhibit, every written plea would have to be translated beforehand and read into the record, in court, in the other three languages. It meant also that every question addressed to a witness in direct or cross-examination would have to be translated first into his or her language, and then into the other two for the benefit of counsel, the tribunal and the defendants. Further,’ he said, ‘cross-examinations would lose their impact if questions were asked in a language which the witness understood, because he would have the right to hear the question in his mother tongue, a disastrous handicap for prosecution and defence alike. Every reaction in that courtroom would be delayed by a time factor of three times the original statement. It also meant that the trial would last three times as long, cost three times as much and that, to put it in simple terms, it would fall flat. There may also be many auxiliary effects, such as people dying, including defendants, or returning home (not including defendants) and many, many more.’
Dostert had put all this to the powers that be and the reaction had been something like, ‘for heaven’s sake, solve it,’ and he did.
Simultaneous interpretation is now being used so widely that few people need information on it, but when the Nuremberg Trials started, no one knew about it. Thus, we read in the Press that: ‘For simultaneous interpretation, an installation involving earphones, microphones and selector switches is required. The original statement, such as testimony before the court, is delivered into a microphone that is connected, by cable, to the earphones of an interpreter. As he listens to the speaker, the interpreter will deliver, simultaneously, a spoken translation into a microphone in his booth, or cabin. A cable connects his microphone as well as those of other interpreters, seated in other booths, to a selector switch, installed at every seat in the auditorium where a listener can dial that channel which carries the language he wishes to hear, such as, for instance, Channel 1 for English, Channel 2 for French, Channel 3 for Russian and Channel 4 for German’.
This was the system which Dostert was planning to install in the Nuremberg court room. He solved the problem of the installation easily, and Tom Watson, the head of IBM, agreed to have it built and shipped to Nuremberg before the trial began.
The second component of the scheme was not so easy to arrange; this was the interpreters, an indispensable item on the agenda, and they had to be found – if, indeed, they existed.
As far as Dostert was concerned, he needed truly bi-lingual people. They had to know, to all intents and purposes, every word they were going to hear during the trial in one language and know its counterpart in the language into which they were going to interpret. They had to know the psychology, the character, the intellect (or lack thereof), the history, and background, of the people whose mother tongue they were to interpret into their, the interpreter’s language. In actual fact, they had to have lived in ‘the other’ country, or at least extensively among its people.
To achieve the total accuracy Dostert wanted for the trial, he would therefore need three interpreters for each booth – one for each of the languages from which the booth was working. For example: in the English booth he required one interpreter to work from French, one from German and one from Russian. This meant twelve interpreters were needed for the team, but one team could not have worked uninterrupted. Dostert decided, quite correctly, that he needed three teams, or thirty-six bi-linguists.
Having found a handful in the US, he ran out of candidates. He discovered a few more in Geneva and still didn’t have enough. So he obtained carte blanche from a suitably high-ranking source to search all the personnel files anywhere in Germany that might lead to suitable candidates. His staff went to the US personnel office in Frankfurt and British Army Headquarters. Naturally, they researched personnel files in Nuremberg and that’s how he discovered me.
During our first meeting Dostert grilled me for two hours about my background, education, topical subjects, hobbies, contacts, references and my Army career. When we finished, he requested (ordered would have been more accurate) my transfer from Turrell’s minions to his own staff.
The CO was upset. Here was the worst officer he had, getting the best job. He even put up some resistance and got himself into everybody’s bad books, but I bequeathed my stack of un-translated documents to Leslie Hill, pulled up stakes and departed towards the camp of the interpreting staff-to-be.
1
Colonel Leon Dostert (1904-1971) was a French born American scholar of languages who introduced Simultaneous Interpretation to the world at the Nuremberg Trials where he was Head of the US Language Division.