The voice in the booth

Linh, 41, has spent fifteen years in glass booths at the back of conference halls, turning Vietnamese into English and English into Vietnamese as speakers talk. We met in a café near the hall where she had just finished a two-day meeting on port logistics. She orders tea and apologises for being tired. Then she goes on to explain why, an hour after the job, her own voice still sounds strange to her. It is as if it belonged to somebody else.

I asked what the work feels like from the inside. "Like carrying a full bowl of soup across a crowded room," she says. "You are listening to the speaker, working out what they mean and speaking in the other language, all at once, and you are always a few seconds behind. You cannot stop to think because the speaker will not stop, so you learn to trust your ears and let the sentence form as you go." She says new interpreters often freeze when they hit a word they do not know. "Never freeze. Say what the speaker means in simpler words and move on."

Given the strain, interpreters work in pairs and swap every twenty or thirty minutes. The partner who is off still follows the speech, writes down figures and names, and slides a note across the desk if the other has missed something important. "Attention goes first," Linh says. "After half an hour, the mistakes begin: a number reversed, a negative dropped. It is rarely dramatic, but one missed 'not' in a contract negotiation can cost the client real money." I asked whether she ever gets used to it. "The nerves fade. The tiredness does not."

The hardest speakers, she says, are not the ones with accents or fast speech. They are the ones who read from a script at top speed, without pausing, and the ones who tell jokes. "A pun has no translation. I either explain it, which kills it, or say 'the speaker has made a joke', and then everyone laughs out of politeness." She laughs herself. "I once saw a whole room laugh at my announcement of a joke, and not at the joke. Honestly, that was the better result."

What does she think a good interpreter should never do? "Add an opinion. Our job is to disappear." That rule is harder than it sounds when a client is rude. She keeps her own tone neutral, she says, and saves her feelings for the taxi home. Does she mind being invisible? "Not at all. If nobody notices me, I have done it properly." Then she finishes her tea, puts her phone in her bag, and asks, with a smile, whether we could please stop talking for a while.