Testimony

The first thing they teach you as a court interpreter, Farida Haddad liked to say, is that you do not exist.

You are a conduit, a pane of glass. You render every word the witness says, in the first person, as precisely and neutrally as you can, and you add nothing, omit nothing, explain nothing. If the witness hesitates, you hesitate. If the witness swears, you swear. You do not soften, you do not clarify, and above all you do not interpret in the colloquial sense of the word: you do not decide what the witness really means. Your loyalty is not to the prosecution or the defence, nor even to the witness, but to the words themselves. An interpreter who forgets this, her old tutor had warned, is no longer impartial, and an interpreter who is not impartial is worse than useless; she is dangerous.

Farida had worked in the criminal courts for eleven years, mostly interpreting Arabic and French, and she had always found a kind of austere comfort in this discipline. It relieved her of responsibility. Whatever happened in the courtroom, it was not her doing.

The case at Southwark Crown Court that autumn was a manslaughter trial. A man had died after falling from a scaffold on a building site, and the site manager, a Lebanese man in his fifties named Karim Nassar, was accused of having ignored repeated warnings that the scaffold was unsafe. The key witness for the prosecution was a young labourer, Youssef, who had worked on the site and spoke very little English. Farida was assigned to interpret his testimony.

For most of the morning, it was routine. Youssef described the site, the working hours, the condition of the scaffold. He was nervous but clear. Then the prosecuting barrister asked the question on which, Farida knew, the whole case turned.

“Did you tell Mr Nassar that the scaffold was dangerous?”

Youssef answered without hesitation. And Farida, in the fraction of a second before she spoke, felt the ground shift beneath her.

The word he had used was a dialect word from southern Lebanon, one that Farida knew well because her own grandmother had used it. In its most common sense, it meant “I told him”. But it also carried a second, softer sense, closer to “I mentioned it to him” or even “I let him know, in passing”. It implied, depending on the tone and the context, either a direct warning or something much vaguer: a remark made in conversation, which the listener might easily have failed to register as a warning at all.

In Arabic, the ambiguity was natural and unremarkable. Every listener from that region would have understood that the meaning lay somewhere between the two, and would have judged it by the speaker’s manner. But English would force her to choose. “I told him” sounded like a clear, direct warning, the kind a reasonable manager would be culpable for ignoring. “I mentioned it” sounded like something a busy man might plausibly not have heard.

The difference, she understood, might be the difference between a guilty verdict and an acquittal.

She had perhaps two seconds. The barrister was waiting. The jury was waiting. Karim Nassar, in the dock, was looking at her.

“I told him,” Farida said.

It was, strictly speaking, the correct translation. It was the first meaning in any dictionary. It was what most interpreters would have said. And yet, as the barrister moved on to the next question, she felt a deep and growing unease, because she was not certain that it was what Youssef had meant. His tone had been flat, almost casual. She had a strong, irrational sense, built on years of listening to her grandmother, that the softer meaning was closer to the truth.

She interpreted the rest of the testimony with scrupulous care, but her mind was elsewhere. At the lunch adjournment, she sat alone in the interpreters’ room with a sandwich she did not eat.

There was a procedure for this. If an interpreter believed that an interpretation had been inaccurate or incomplete, she could inform the judge, who would decide how to proceed. But Farida was not sure her interpretation had been inaccurate. It had been accurate. It had simply been incomplete, in a way that was perhaps inevitable: no translation could carry the full weight of a word across from one language to another. To raise it would be to admit, in open court, that she had made a judgement, that she had not, in fact, been a pane of glass. It would be to step out of her invisibility.

And there was a less noble consideration, which she forced herself to acknowledge. If she raised it, she might be seen as favouring the defence. Nassar was Lebanese, like her family. Someone might well suggest that she was sympathetic to him. Her professional reputation, which she had built carefully over eleven years, rested entirely on the perception that she favoured no one.

She thought about the man who had died, whose family sat in the public gallery every day. She thought about Nassar, who might spend years in prison. She thought about Youssef, who had sworn to tell the truth and had trusted her to carry that truth into a language he could not speak.

In the end, it was a matter of conscience. Her tutor’s rule, she realised, had always contained a hidden assumption: that a perfectly neutral translation was possible. Sometimes it was not. And when it was not, invisibility was not neutrality. It was simply a choice made in silence, without anyone knowing it had been made.

When the court resumed, she asked to address the judge.

She explained, as briefly and plainly as she could, that the word the witness had used carried a nuance that her interpretation had not conveyed, and that it could mean either “I told him” or something closer to “I mentioned it to him”. She did not say which she believed was correct. That, she said, was not for her to decide.

The judge listened carefully, thanked her, and allowed both barristers to put further questions to Youssef to clarify his meaning. Under gentle questioning, he explained that he had raised the scaffold once, during a tea break, among other complaints about the site. He had not thought of it as a formal warning. He did not know whether Mr Nassar had been listening.

Farida never learned how much this mattered to the jury’s decision. Nassar was convicted, months later, on a lesser charge, after other evidence emerged about safety failures on the site. She did not follow the case after that.

But she did revise the lecture she gave each year to trainee interpreters. She still began by telling them that they did not exist. Then she added a second sentence, which she had not been taught.

“Except,” she said, “when your silence would be louder than your voice.”