How to Understand

Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian onto me.--Corinthians I, 14:11.

Last week, U.N.'s weary interpreters could eat big lunches again--a luxury strictly prohibited while they were on duty. It had been quite a job, preventing diplomats from sounding like barbarians to each other, but they had carried it off with astounding smoothness. Chiefly responsible for their brilliant performance was a sad-eyed, grey-maned Frenchman called George J. Mathieu--a veteran of the League of Nations--who had hired, trained and organized them.

As chief of U.N.'s language division, Mathieu heads 49 interpreters and translators in the U.S. and Europe. To help them, he has propounded four ground rules which might well serve as a simple syllabus of pentecostal understanding in a Tower-of-Babel era.

1. Always go easy on reproducing oratorical violence--even though some diplomats resent it. Last year in Berlin, a British delegate branded a colleague's statement as a "damn lie." Mathieu rendered this in French as: "The honorable gentleman has not told the facts in a manner which checks with the information which I myself have on those facts." The Britisher insisted that all he had said was: "That is a damn lie."

2. Be patient. Once during U.N.'s London meeting, Bevin and Vishinsky were discussing Greece in card-table metaphors. Said Vishinsky: "No etot tuz ne nasto yashchi." The patient interpreter's first try: "But this ace is a funny one." Vishinsky did not like it. The interpreter tried again: "This ace is not a genuine one." But Vishinsky was not satisfied until the sentence swelled to: "The ace which Mr. Bevin pulls out of the deck of cards is not an absolutely normal ace."

3. Know what you are talking about. Mathieu insists that an interpreter must know all about U.N. affairs and current history--and a great many other things as well. When the Iranian Ambassador told the Council how Premier Gavam had been dined & wined in Moscow last month, the French interpretation mentioned only dining. Wine, Mathieu explained later, was a matter of course to a Frenchman.

4. Avoid blunders. Mathieu recalls how one of his Geneva colleagues, a gentleman of impressive girth, all but broke up a session when he slapped his paunch and solemnly repeated after a woman delegate: "Speaking as a wife and as a devoted mother. . . ."

His own worst boner dates also from his League days when, involuntarily prophetic, he spoke of a "pact of nonassistance and mutual aggression."

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