This example implies that the reporter was firmly‘embedded’, all his/her reports being censored, or even modified by the ‘translator’. On occasions mistranslation which had obviously occurred through the interpreter’s allegiance to one party could be identified by television viewers, who were able to understand Serbo-Croat themselves whilst hearing the soundtrack and reading the subtitled‘translation’on the television screen. Michel Collon quotes an example of this, taken from an RTL-TV1 TV-news broadcast in the autumn of 1993. On a road crowded with thousands of refugees who were leaving Bosnia, Charles Neuforge, a journalist from Luxembourg, interviewed an elderly woman through his‘fixer’:

The elderly woman (in a sad tone): “We’ve had a hard time finding food, and the water has been cut off. In this icy winter, things are getting worse by the day.”

The translator (venomenously): “The Serbs left us to die like dogs.”

The elderly woman: “We couldn’t do anything else, we didn’t have any choice.”

The translator: “The Serbs chased us out, destroying everything.”

(Collon 1994:44) (My translation)

Misinterpretation could affect the journalist’s trust in the interpreter, but if the former suspected lack of professionalism or incompetence, and bypassed his interpreter by only conducting interviews with people who could speak the journalists own language, however badly, this could impair the confidence of the interviewee who was obliged to express him/herself in a foreign language, and be thus placed at a disadvantage. Danica Seleskovitch refers to this type of situation when she claims that 

Dans sa propre langue, on plie sa langue à sa pensée, dans une langue étrangère on plie sa pensée à sa langue. Être forcé de parler la langue de l’autre c’est à tous égards et en toutes circonstances être mis en situation d’infériorité. (Seleskovitch 1983: 5)

[When you are expressing yourself in your own tongue you adapt the language to express your thoughts, but in a foreign tongue you adapt your thoughts to the language. If you are obliged to express yourself in a foreign tongue then you are always in a weaker situation. (My translation)

Thus the quality of the inter-personal relationship between the reporter and interpreter was crucial. There were also instances of them being obliged to face together the problems of the acceptability of the topic by the media headquarters abroad. Foreign news desks sometimes‘ordered’unrealistic journalistic stories. For example, in 1991, a French television crew asked if the interpreter-fixer could find an excavation of a mass grave, such an item being deemed by the Paris news desk as an appropriate item for the evening news of the day!

Whether working for the media, or for NGOs, translators and interpreters were often faced with situations which made it difficult for them to maintain impartiality. On one hand, they were operating in tandem with professional logisticians whose brief was to accomplish humanitarian missions away from their own homelands, whilst the translators and interpreters were faced with the misery of their own community in need, and required to maintain cold professionalism and refrain from showing too much empathy for the sake of the mission. On the other hand, translators could hardly avoid establishing close personal relationships with their employers, when on the road together.

The peace-keeping forces constantly required large numbers of interpreters for their contacts with the local population. The translation situation was at its most intricate in Kosovo, where the two communities in conflict had different mother tongues, Serbo-Croatian and Albanian. The following was reported to the author by a fellow Serbian professional translator who had left Kosovo in December 1999. This was six months after the arrival in the region of NATO military forces, and when the UN civilian mission (UNMIK) had been installed there for five months.

Members of the two international missions, who numbered roughly twenty thousand, sought a large number of interpreters. As each unit required interpretation and translation to take place in two language directions, they sought a large number of linguists. The UN missions had brought in their translators from Croatia and Macedonia, but needed to recruit other staff from the local Serbian and Albanian communities. With time, the peacekeeping forces introduced cost-cutting measures, and the only interpreters to be retained were Albanians. The Serbian population could not speak Albanian, whereas the Albanians could speak Serbian, or at least claimed to be able to do so. However the reasons why many Serbian interpreters stopped working were not confined to linguistics or to economics. Some female interpreters resigned due to the psychological strain of having to deal with harrowing situations and the grisly minutiae of criminal investigations. Some Serbian interpreters, and we have mentioned that many of these interpreters language teachers who spoke fluent English, were forced to abandon their posts because they had been physically threatened and consequently they were obliged to flee their native region, the peace-keeping forces being unable to guarantee their protection.

Some of the ad hoc interpreters who had been hastily recruited from the local Albanian population were dismissed because of their poor linguistic ability. In the context of a criminal investigation to misinterpret and say “he used his fist” instead of “he used his palm” could be a vital error. However the sacked interpreters were usually replaced quickly, as candidates were frequently provided by established networks of intermediaries associated with the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA). Unsurprisingly though, this did not necessarily lead to an improvement in the standard of interpretation, which also included some instances of apparently deliberate misinterpretation. Usually this was carried out through either exaggerating or attenuating the source discourse. Furthermore it was argued that the loyalty of Albanian interpreters towards their local authorities may have led a number of them to use knowledge which they had gained whilst working to expose interviewees to subsequent intimidatory visits from units of the KLA. All the above illustrate how the three pre-requisites of professional translation and interpreting which were discussed by the conference interpreting trainer Danica Seleskovitch, that is to say linguistic knowledge, subject knowledge and methodology, are far from being mapped onto the reality of practice in conflict situations.

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