The Translator's Pause

The delegation's itinerary allowed forty minutes for the factory visit, including gratitude, photographs and what the schedule called an informal exchange. As interpreter, Nadia was expected to make informality proceed punctually.

The director welcomed the visitors and praised the workforce's resilience. A technician at the back remarked that resilience was considerably cheaper than replacing the heating. In his language the sentence had the compact familiarity of a joke repeated through several winters.

Nadia could translate it accurately. Accuracy was not the difficulty. Delivered without its local weariness, the remark might sound like an organised challenge; softened into a cheerful comment about the weather, it would cease to be the technician's remark at all.

She paused. The director glanced at her, inviting, with the smallest movement of his head, a manageable version of events.

"He says the staff have had to be resilient partly because the heating still needs replacing," she translated. "It's a familiar joke here."

The visitors laughed, then one asked how long the heating had been unreliable. The director supplied an answer that would have benefited from several qualifications. Nadia supplied those that had actually been spoken and no others.

Afterwards, the technician thanked her for not making him sound braver than he was. The director thanked her for preserving the friendly atmosphere. Neither compliment entirely pleased her.

On the journey home, a visitor remarked that a good interpreter should be invisible. Nadia considered agreeing; she was tired, and invisibility would have made the conversation shorter.

Instead, she said that somebody had to decide where the edges of a sentence were. The visitor asked what she meant. This time, there was no timetable pressing her to make the answer look effortless.