Speaking in Tongues
You're Only as Good as Your Translator
Seyhmus is a craggy Turkish Arab with blow-dried hair and vigorous gestures that he employs to cut off the ramblings of others less interesting than himself. He is not, I believe, a stupid man. I hired him as my interpreter in Diyarbakir, Turkey, last February, and we were hoping to cross into Iraq and head to a conference in the Kurdish enclave. In a taxicab dense with cigarette smoke, we sped through a snowstorm toward the border. We passed military outposts guarded by armored vehicles and wound our way through the ancient citadel town of Mardin. Earlier, I had expressed interest in the thousands of trucks abandoned along the roads in this region, idled by United Nations sanctions against Iraq. Now Seyhmus considered it his duty to point them out whenever they caught his eye. “Trucks,” he would say. “Yes, I know,” I replied.
Southeastern Turkey was swarming with foreign correspondents in advance of the Iraq war, and every interpreter and schoolteacher who could conjugate an English verb seemed to have been snapped up by other journalists. So I was paying $100 a day to a tour guide who, after twenty-seven years of living in Hamburg, had apparently concluded that English and German were interchangeable. Seyhmus never understood me the first time I said anything, so through repetition I distilled each thought to an essence he got, most of the time. Once when I inquired about the time of my flight the following Sunday, he made a quick call on his mobile phone and announced, “Okay, I done. I cancel your billet.” It cost me $60 to get my seat back.
Oddly, though, I miss working with Seyhmus, and others like him. After more than six years of freelancing from Russia and the Middle East, I recently returned to the United States. True, it is liberating to conduct an interview without an intermediary, but an interpreter embodies the adventure of reporting abroad. He becomes your voice and ears, your cultural adviser in a foreign land, smoothing over your faux pas, offering tips, for example, about Russian gangsters in Hokkaido or businessmen who sell ostriches from China to North Korea. (Seyhmus notwithstanding, most interpreters I have worked with have spoken good English.) A translated interview is interrupted by frequent pauses, but you come to appreciate a pace that allows you to observe your surroundings: the tarpaulin roof of a Palestinian refugee’s home near Amman, the bales of hay on the roofs at the Birqash camel market near Cairo, the shabby suit coat of a North Korean guest laborer in Vladivostok. The interpreter often takes pride in reading the story you produce, and makes a handy fact-checker. And he illuminates an unfamiliar land.
Often they surprise you. Unexpectedly, I gained an insight into China and globalization when a long-haired interpreter who played in a rock band told me, “Just call me by my English name: Superboy.” And whenever I think of Mongolia, I recall crossing the steppes with Gereltuv, a young man who advised my wife and me to stock up on flour, sugar, and cigarettes — gifts for the nomads we would interview about a killer winter that had decimated the nation’s livestock. The weathered herders we found south of Ulan Bator would dismount their camels or scrawny ponies, crouch in the grass stubble and snow, and talk with Gereltuv. We visited the yurt of a herdsman named Gambaa and sat with his family around a potbellied stove while the women served us salted tea. The family’s goat kids shared the dwelling so they wouldn’t freeze to death in their first winter. The kids clambered onto the low table to nibble at a bowl of cheese Gambaa’s sister-in-law, Gereltuya, served us.
We pinched off morsels that were unmarked by goat teeth.
“You know, they probably have very little cheese after a winter like that,” Gereltuv said. “It’s an honor that they’re sharing it with you.”
“Tell her it’s delicious.”
“She says, ‘Have some more.’”
My reliance on interpreters dates to January 1997, when I began editing an English-language biweekly in Vladivostok, a Russian port on the Sea of Japan. At the time I knew no Russian beyond glasnost and zek (a gulag prisoner); without a translator I was lost. At first I often worked with Sveta, a young, slender, hawk-nosed interpreter who tended to fall into conversation with sources and forget to translate. I would interrupt to ask, “Can you fill me in here, Sveta?”
“Just a minute,” Sveta said, “I’m just trying to figure out what she’s getting at.” The discussion would continue until Sveta decided to bring me up to speed.
Yet Sveta also helped shed light on notorious elements of Russian society. From her habit of hanging out in casinos she knew mobsters, and several months after I arrived in Vladivostok, she took me to the funeral of a friend of hers, a Russian crime boss who had been assassinated. Afterward we joined a throng of mourners — a crippled don surrounded by bodyguards, gangsters with shorn heads, women in stiletto heels and black, backless dresses — as they tossed down vodka shots in a restaurant next door. Sveta grabbed my arm and pointed out a nearby tough. “You see that man? He just told his girlfriend, ‘That guy’s wearing a blue shirt. That’s disrespectful. I’m going to kill him.’”
I was wearing a dark blue shirt. “You mean me?”
“Who else?”
“Maybe we should go.”
“It’s up to you.”
Vladivostok is close to China, a country I visited four times, and the Middle Kingdom presented problems all its own. Foreign reporters are not supposed to enter without permission, but even though I used tourist visas I had no trouble working when I explained that I was writing about business (I sometimes thought I could have written about the transplanting of executed convicts’ organs if I’d said, “I just want to look at the business aspect”). I always sought translators through private or semiofficial contacts, but I had no illusions that the men and women who showed up at my hotel were independent. In Dalian a reporter for China Daily directed me to a translator who used the English name Robert. He said he was happy to work for me free of charge; he wanted to practice his English, he explained. He even promised to find a car and driver. The next morning Robert arrived in a white sedan with no license plates and Chinese flags fluttering from the front fenders. In the end, the trip was a success, and Robert must have enjoyed the time together as well, for when I returned to Vladivostok, he asked me to go into business with him.
I promised to give a few of his cards to a businessman friend in Vladivostok.
Now the foreign adventure is over, for the moment, at least. I thought I was a pretty good reporter abroad, but my experience with Seyhmus taught me a lesson in humility: that a reporter in an alien land is no better than his interpreter, and when your conduit to a culture is unreliable, no amount of enterprise can make up for it. In prewar southeastern Turkey, wherever we stopped, Kurdish villagers would greet me with delight. “America!” they said. “You are welcome! This is America’s village.” But just as the interviews got started, Seyhmus’s cell phone would ring and he would bark at our sources to hold it down.
That evening we interviewed some truck drivers along a dirt road in Cizre, and they invited Seyhmus, our cabdriver, and me for dinner. Our arrival was an event for the whole neighborhood. Perhaps forty people crowded a two-room, concrete-walled home to gape at the American. As dinner arrived the women and children slipped out, and the men sat on cushions on the carpeted floor around a glowing oil drum, and we feasted on chicken, rice, yogurt, tomato and cucumber salad, and flatbread. We had settled back to sip sugary tea when Seyhmus bestirred himself and began hectoring the Kurds. Whenever they tried to speak he warded off their objections with the flat of his palm.
Eventually he explained. The Kurds had been complaining about their hard lot in life, and he could not abide whining. They were lazy, that was their problem. “I tell them, ‘I am one Muslim, but I no wait for God help me. God no pay me. I work with my two hands.’”
Then he went at our hosts once again, arguing the way generals storm cities. I feared they might cut his throat, but the Kurds rolled their cigarettes with mild Iraqi tobacco and heard him out, possibly because, as they told him, they regarded him as a rich man. After all, the American was paying him unthinkable rates just to chat.
The next day we reached the Iraqi border, where perhaps a hundred journalists from around the world milled about, waiting to cross over to the Kurdish region of Iraq and cover a conference in Erbil on Iraq’s future. They clustered around the Turkish army conscripts, asking when we would be allowed through the border. But the Turks said it would be three days before they would let us through, and that would strain my freelance budget to the breaking point. Besides, several papers I wrote for already had staff reporters in Turkey.
Still, I hesitated.
Seyhmus was all for going to Iraq. He discovered something in his pocket and fished it out: a packet of nondairy creamer.
“Look,” he said. “This have corn soup and phosfarts in it.”
“Phosfarts?”
A brisk nod. “No good.”
All the way back to Diyarbakir, as night fell across Turkey, Seyhmus kept pointing out dark shapes by the road. “Truck,” he would say.
“Yes, I know,” I replied.
Seyhmus nodded, happy, as always, to be of assistance.
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