Belgian Nuns and Chinese Students as Wartime Interpreters

This year being the centennial of the outbreak of World War I (the 'Great War') in 1914, there has been an abundance of articles about it. Not to be outdone, my favourite language magazine The Linguist devotes a section of its current issue to Languages at War. One of the articles is Emerging from the Great War by Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. As Sandrijn is Belgian, it's natural that some of her article is about Belgians. However, she also produces a surprise: the interpreters of the Chinese Labour Corps. The British army recruited this corps to relieve the workload for the fighting troops on the Western Front, and estimates of its size range from 92,000 to 200,000. Some 40,000 were also recruited by the French.

But first the Belgians.

"As the Germans advanced through Belgium, people fled with around 250,000 crossing the North Sea to England. Very few knew any English, so help was needed, and this was often found with women's organisations… They organised themselves into volunteer groups, such as the Women's Emergency Corps and Women's Catholic League and took care of refugees by providing lodgings, healthcare and interpreting services. As well as interpreting, these volunteers were cultural brokers…
Some were Belgians or had spent time in Belgium. The congregation of the Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk, for example, originated in Belgium, coming to the UK in the 1850s. It was a very international community and, from 1895 onwards, all novices spent a year at the convent in Haacht, Belgium [see image]. Many of them therefore knew at least some Flemish. As the Ursulines wished to propagate the Christian faith through community service, it is likely that some of the nuns volunteered as interpreters. Belgian priests were also a good source of interpreting."

So here we have an example of a religious order producing Native Interpreters because it was an international organisation – as are, of course, many religious organisations of all faiths. Also of how the contexts in which the organisations work draw them to interpreting. Religion has been a great stimulus for interpreting as it has been for written translation, and it still is. See the numerous mentions of church interpreters on this blog.

The very different story of the Chinese Labour Corps takes us to the other side of the globe and of humanity. But there are connections. First the Churches. Many of the labourers were Christians and were recruited by missionaries. And then much of what we know about the labourers' sufferings comes from the diary of Father John Van Welleghen, a Belgian parish priest in Flanders who kept a diary throughout the war. His entries reflect the sympathetic attitude of the local people towards victims of the abysmally racist British Army's harsh methods. Though volunteers, they had signed contracts committing them to three years of military discipline and they were segregated in camps under armed guard. The French behaved slightly better; they at least allowed many Chinese to stay on in France after the armistice. A Chinese phrase book prepared by the British Army is suggestive: Less talk, more work, Why don't you eat this food, This is a bad business.

Which brings us to the language problem.

Most of the labourers were illiterate peasants. One solution might have been to teach some of them basic English or French, but it would have been slow. Then the recruiters in China hit on an unexpected pool of ready-made Native Translators. English and French were being widely taught in Chinese universities and missionary colleges.

"Along with the mainly illiterate peasants came a few hundred ambitious Chinese students to act as interpreters, keen to discover new ideas and European culture. They found themselves interacting with a class of Chinese they had not encountered before. In Chinese society of the time… an educated person would have no contact with the illiterate masses. Yet the war threw them together, and with lasting consequences."

Since those consequences were social and political, they are beyond the scope of this blog. However, they constitute an interesting example of the effects of interpreting on the interpreter.

One interpreter stands out as a particularly valuable source, because he later published his memoirs. His name was Gu Xingqing.

"Gu's book is the only book-length account of the First World War by a Chinese national known to exist… Gu tells the story of his journey from his home village in China to Europe, his work in France and Belgium and his return home. Although published nearly two decades after the events, Gu's account proves to be highly accurate in terms of dates and events. His main source… were the notes he had taken in Europe but which he lost during a Japanese raid… in Shanghai in 1932."

Unfortunately it's not available in English. But it stands alongside Mantoux's account of the Paris Peace Conference or the Barón de las Torres' report on the Hitler-Franco meeting at Hendaye as a case where the most reliable source for historians is the notes taken by the interpreters.


Correction
Sandrijn's article starts off with an important error. Her subtitle reads, "The professionalisation of interpreting began during WW1." The statement only makes any sense if all interpreting is equated with conference interpreting; and we may observe that Sandrijn, according to her profile in the magazine, is herself a conference interpreter. Professional Conference Interpreters tend to be dismissive of other branches of interpreting. The facts are that the French had professionalised trade interpreting in the Levant and in Canada (les Interprètes du Roy) by the 17th century; that their army had a corps of interpreters for its North African campaigns in the 19th century; that the British had professionalised their diplomatic interpreting in the Middle and Far East by the mid-19th century (see my article on Ernest Satow); that Mr Melas in the Sherlock Holmes story The Greek Interpreter was a professional court and tourist-guide interpreter in late Victorian London; and that even Paul Mantoux, the father of modern conference interpreting, was a wartime Professional Military Interpreter before he was assigned to the Paris Peace Conference. There are photos of him in his army uniform. And so on.

Sources
Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. Emerging from the Great War. The Linguist, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 10-11, 2014, The Linguist is published by the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), London. Go to http://thelinguist.uberflip.com/t/34433 or click here.

Helen Fitzwilliam. First World War: China's forgotten foreign legion. The World Today, vol. 70, no. 3, 2014. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/first-world-war-china%E2%80%99s-forgotten-foreign-legion or click here.
There's a short documentary film attached to the article.

Gu Xingqing. Wikipedia, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_Xingqing or click here.

Images
1. Tildonk Ursuline Convent. Source: Deelnemers, Tildonk.
2. British officer with CLC labourers. Photographer: 2nd Lt. David McLellan. Source: Ministry of Information Official Collection.

At the Gateway to Spain: Hitler, Franco, Pétain and their Interpreters

October 23 marks the anniversary of the famous meeting between Hitler and Franco in the railway station of the strategic French frontier town of Hendaye (Spanish Hendaya) in 1940. Hitler came as conqueror of most of Western Europe and most recently France. Franco was the victor in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Both were members of the alliance of fascist dictators called the Axis. Yet despite their initial cordiality and nine hours of talks, neither of them got what he'd come for.

There was a post on this blog about it in 2010. Since neither dictator spoke the other's language, the meeting could not have gone ahead without interpreters. Three interpreters were involved, two German (Gross and Schmidt) and one Spanish (the Barón de la Torres), but only Gross and the Spaniard actually interpreted that day. The single Professional Expert, Schmidt, was sidelined because he didn't work in Spanish, but he was there to supervise and observe. De las Torres was an Advanced Native Translator who had learnt German well as a foreign affairs official. As for Gross, we know about him only that he wasn't an Expert and was not really up to the task.

The post was well received; one comment described it as "like looking at a film." But 2010 is already a long time ago. So this year, with some additional information at my disposal, I've retrieved the post from where it's buried in the blog and worked it up into a full article. And for good measure, I've thrown in the post from 2012 about Hitler's subsequent meeting immediately afterwards with France's Pétain, likewise interpreter mediated.

So if you're interested in the history of diplomatic interpreting, or in Spain's ambivalent role in World War II, or in spying, get over to my page on academia.edu (https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS, or click here) and open or download the article At the Gateway to Spain.

Ninth of October — Work in Progress

Having more or less recovered from the tiredness that beset me after the journey to Ireland and England, I can now foresee regular resumption of this blog no later than October 23. That's the anniversary of the interpreter-mediated meeting between Hitler and Franco in 1940.

Meanwhile I'm preparing my survey and taxonomy of interpreting for publication. A Spanish translation was published some 20 years ago, but for some reason the English original has lain gathering dust. Unfortunately part of the file has been corrupted in the meantime and has to be reconstituted.

I want to thank all the people who made my Ireland-England trip possible and turned it into a happy memory. The cheerful staff of Dublin City University and the COLING conference, my fellow members of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), my kind English cousins who drove me around and the staff at Bletchley Park. And last but not least the ground staff of Ryanair.

Ryanair is a very successful low-cost Irish airline. Not only are their flights dirt cheap if you fly on the right days, but they operate services that nobody else does. Non-stop flights from Valencia to Dublin for example. But they don't have a good reputation for customer service. Well, I too have had a moment of anxiety with them and it's no joke navigating through their online reservation system, But I must say that on this occasion their ground service for passengers with a mobility problem was impeccable at every airport: efficient and friendly.

Incidentally, we decided in Dublin that the next COLING will be held in Osaka, Japan, in late 2016.

I break silence today because it's another anniversary. El Nou d'Octubre (Ninth of October), the national day of Valencia. For earlier posts about it, enter octubre in the Search box on the right. It's the day when King James I of Aragon entered the city, making it finally Christian. He'd arrived nearby with his army a little earlier, on September 28, 1238, and he used the intervening days to negotiate, with the aid of Jewish translators, a bloodless rendition by the Moors. Meanwhile he camped his army on the stretch of Mediterranean seashore where I now live and which is today called Pinedo. It's five km south of the city centre. There's a stone cross to mark the site, but it's had to be moved inland because of coast erosion. James wasn't only a formidable warrior, he was also a very able administrator and there are still vestiges of his administration. Hence the Valencian College of Notaries is the oldest professional association of notaries in Spain; their current building is a landmark.

Want to celebrate it with me? There's a rousing performance of the Valencian national anthem on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esDfiT4H_XM or click here.

But if you fancy something less political, go to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXHcc12kWYY or click here.

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The Senyera, the Valencian flag.

My Pilgrimage to Bletchley (conclusion)

This post is the conclusion of the preceding one, which please read first.


Japanese
When I was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in the late 1940s, my best friend was a linguist named Peter Judd. He was a Natural Bilingual: mother French, father English. But his mother had died while he was very young and he'd been educated in England. So his English was dominant and he'd also learnt the usual grammar school languages: French and Latin, and perhaps Greek or German. By the time I met him, he was doing a PhD in phonetics under the influential linguist J R Firth. But during WWII he was called up for service in the Royal Navy. However, to his surprise, the Navy didn't send him to sea; instead it sent him on a crash course to learn Japanese. He never told me what he did with his Japanese. In the 1940s and for long afterwards it was still secret. Now, at BP, I began to understand.

"After Pearl Harbor… the need for Japanese linguists for military and intelligence work became acute… The War Office [which had previously refused funding for Japanese courses] clamoured for Japanese speakers and SOAS set up a special course for grammar school boys in their last year at school… But SOAS was bombed and the course did not start until May 1942... They also ran a 10-week course in Japanese radio signals."

I used to think that all the work on breaking the Japanese codes had been done by the Americans. While the Germans were developing Enigma, the Japanese had been developing their own machine for their diplomatic codes. The US Army code-named it Purple. The Americans broke into its code by 1940, and the intelligence obtained from it, which they called Magic, became the equivalent of the British Ultra. However, the Japanese used many more totally different codes and ciphers than the Germans during the course of the war, probably 55 in all. The most important of them operationally was their naval code JN25. It was decrypts of JN25 that enabled the Americans to prepare for the Battle of Midway and to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto's plane over the Solomon Islands – this last exploit a terrible blow to Japanese morale.

But the British too worked on JN25, and Hut 7 at BP also had a section that worked on Japanese Army Air Force Codes. The British had their own reasons. Large pieces of what was then still the British Empire lay in the Pacific theatre of war. Thus it was JN25 decrypts that gave them warning of a Japanese attack on the British fleet at Colombo, which was intended to be another Pearl Harbor.

"HMS Anderson was the Intelligence Unit of the Eastern Fleet's Headquarters at Colombo, linked to Bletchley Park. They were working one sultry afternoon in Colombo on a message that described plans for a massive attack somewhere. Then they spelt out the name of the place that was to be clobbered – KO-RO-N-BO. An electric shock ran through the up-to-then relaxed office."

Admiral Somerville moved his fleet out of Colombo in time.

The intercept stations

Most of the enemy communications traffic was transmitted by shortwave radio. That was the Achilles heel that made it possible to intercept it. But shortwave has serious limitations, not only in its geographical range but also because its quality varies according to the time of day. To maintain constant surveillance, many radio monitoring posts were needed and some of them had to be moved around as the Japanese advanced. Thus, as we have just seen in the Colombo example, BP was more than BP itself. It was the coordinating centre of a far-flung web of outstations and listening posts. There was more to BP than meets the visitor's eye.

Having absorbed as much as we could of BP in one day, we pilgrims retired to a good meal at the Three Trees in Milton Keynes. It's typical of a current trend in England: an old pub turned comfortable restaurant. Seventy years on and no reminder of the astute heroism we had been witnessing down the road. To sum up, if you're in London with a day to spare and you're interested in the history of cryptology, computers, translation or WW2, don't miss Bletchley Park.

References
Sue Jarvis. Japanese Codes. New Edition. Report 6. National Codes Centre, Bletchley Park Trust, 2009.

Hugh Denham. Codebreakers. Edited by F. H. Hinsley and A. Stripp. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Michael Smith. The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park's Role In Breaking Japan's Secret Cyphers. Penguin, 2010.

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Flowerdown, Hampshire, UK listening station. It was linked to BP and was bombed twice in one week.
Source: www.alanturing.net

My Bletchley Pilgrimage

On my way home from Dublin to Valencia I stopped off in England. There the help of a younger relative enabled me to fulfil a long-cherished ambition. It was to make a pilgrimage to Bletchley Park (BP). BP is one of the places where programmable electronic computers were invented as a by-product of the Second World War (WW2). It is also where the father of computer science, Alan Turing, worked during that war. I saw his office, now stripped bare, and the little house in the stables area where he also worked. One guesstimate has it that the work accomplished at BP shortened the European war by two to four years and that without it the outcome would have been uncertain.

BP is at Milton Keynes, about an hour by car or by train (from Euston station) north of London. It was originally a fine country mansion in its own park before it was taken over by the British government for its Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) on the eve of WW2. For a long time the work done there was kept secret even after the war. Churchill didn't want the Russians to know about it. He even had its early computer, the Colossus, dismantled; though a replica has been rebuilt in recent years and is on view. Like many others, I first learnt about it with the publication of Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret, in 1974 (see References). Since then numerous other books and articles have been published about it, Nevertheless I learnt many things on my visit and had some surprises. Here are my impressions.

Scale
Clearly BP needed a large and varied staff of cryptologists, translators, engineers, etc. However, the way the temporary wartime 'huts' were disposed throughout the grounds without ruining the park-like environment makes it difficult to imagine. In fact "in January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, some 9000 personnel were working at Bletchley." They used some 400 teleprinters. One wonders where they put them all.

Preparedness
The fact that the BP site was taken over on the very eve of the outbreak of war might lead one to think that the British were poorly prepared for the cryptology tussle. There was, however, a long continuous history behind it that went back to the First World War. The GC&CS began in 1919 in a room, Room 40, at the Admiralty in London. Three outstanding personalities symbolise its continuity. One of them was Commander Alistair Denniston, who was its operational head from 1919 to1942. As such he initiated and supervised the move to BP. It was also Denniston who realised that the enemy's use of electromechanical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would be needed to decode them. Another was Dilly Knox, a papyrologist who turned cryptographer back in Admiralty days and became BP's head cryptographer until his very untimely death in 1943. And the third was none other than Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when Room 40 was established in WW1 and continued his support as Prime Minister into WW2. When a group at BP complained about insufficient resources, he wrote a typical minute on their letter,

"Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."

Enigma and Lorenz
Enigma is the German coding machine that everyone has heard of. It had a long history, starting as a commercially available device in the 1920s. However, the German army also came to have another, equally important machine, the Lorenz. It was important because once it was brought into service in 1942, it was used for high-level communication between the German High Command in Berlin and army commands throughout occupied Europe. It was therefore imperative to do the reverse engineering of it. BP cryptographers succeeded in deducing its workings without ever having seen one; which has been described as "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II." So I learnt at BP to distinguish between the Enigma and the Lorenz, each with different workings and a different target.

Between the wars: the Poles
One of the surprises at BP is the monument to three young Polish cryptographers.

The first to discover the wiring plan of Enigma were not the British but the Poles. The Polish equivalent of GC&CS was already intercepting German Enigma traffic throughout the period 1930-1938. In 1928 an alert Polish customs officer had intercepted an Enigma that was being shipped to the German embassy in Warsaw, and that enabled the Polish Cipher Bureau to examine it. A team of brilliant mathematicians was recruited at Poznan University to work on its cryptology. Most of their work was based on a branch of pure mathematics known as permutation theory. They succeeded, and in 1938 they made a generous gift of their findings to French and British delegations. The British one included Turing and Knox. Their contribution to the British side of the cipher war was invaluable.

The translators
Once the wireless traffic was decrypted, it was still in German. For it to be useful to British intelligence, a large staff of specialised German to English translators had to work in shifts around the clock. There were nothing like enough Professional or Expert Military Translators available to meet the demand. But fortunately there was a good supply of Advanced Native Translators, because German language and literature was still widely taught in British secondary schools. (That's how I learnt it myself, even while the Germans were bombing us!) So graduates from the 'grammar schools', having learnt one foreign language and probably more, were considered prime candidates for further training.

The situation was not so favourable for other languages except French. Among the languages needed was Italian. Though the use of Italian was not comparable to that of German, it was Italian decrypts that enabled the British to win the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941. The British fleet commander came personally to BP to thank the cryptographers.

I'll deal later with Japanese.

To be continued.

References
Group Captain F(red) W. Winterbotham, CBE. The Ultra Secret. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1974.

Bletchley Park official website. www.bletchleypartk.org.uk.

Bletchley Park. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park or click here.

John Pether. The Post Office at War. Bletchley Park Reports 11. Bletchley Park Trust, 2011.

Frank Carter. The First Breaking of Enigma. New edition. Report 2. Bletchley Park Trust, 2008.

The Bletchley Park Reports are available on site at BP.

Battle of Cape Matapan. Wikipedia, 2014.

There are good videos, some of them complete BBC documentaries, about BP on YouTube.

Image
The Mansion at Bletchley Park. Source: www.english-heritage.org.uk

COLING 2014

From August 23 to 29 I'll be attending the COLING conference in Dublin.

COLING is the leading international conference in its speciality, which is computational linguistics. Its sponsor is the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), which is already half a century old. It's held every two years in a different part of the world. The founders were some of the pioneers in machine translation and COLING 2014 will still contain three sessions on MT. However, the scope of computational linguistics has expanded, and there are areas like speech recognition, terminology extraction and translation memories that nowadays rival MT in importance for Expert Translators. To accompany the occasion, I've resurrected an article of mine about translation memories, written in the days when they were still a novelty. The title is Translation Memories: Beyond the Dictionaries and you can find it at https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS or by clicking here.

If any of you are going to be at COLING, I'd be delighted to meet you. I'll be staying in the Hampstead Residence of Dublin City University under my real name of Brian Harris. My cellphone number is 638099029.

A current Ryanair ad urges, "Escape the Irish summer!" and pictures a miserable looking Irishman in a raincoat. But I'm looking forward to it after the heat of Valencia, where the temperature is routinely ten degrees higher.

References
The COLING website is at www.coling-2014.org.

There's a Wikipedia article on the ICCL at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Computational_Linguistics or click here.

The Interpreter's Accent

The interest shown in the recent post about interpreters' voices encourages me to write about a related topic: their accents.

In the case of Natural Interpreters, the matter can be dealt with summarily. Natural interpreters speak with their natural accent, that is to say their normal conversational accent. For one thing, they are probably unaware that it's an issue. And for another, they work in ad hoc circumstances where they wouldn't have the time or the ability to change it.

For Expert Interpreters, however, it may have far more impact.

Some years ago, when Queen Elizabeth of England, who's also head of state of Canada, visited Montreal, she tried to please her French Canadian subjects by making a short speech in their language. It was broadcast nationally. So it was accompanied by simultaneous interpretation because only a minority of English Canadians understand French. The broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, took care to engage a female interpreter with a mature voice. Nevertheless, they overlooked something else. Hardly had the broadcast started when the CBC began to receive phone calls of complaint – this was before the internet – from listeners who objected to hearing Her Majesty 'speak' English with an unmistakably Canadian accent. Let's call this effect of incompatible accents accent shock, by analogy with culture shock.

I myself felt it. When I emigrated from London to Montreal, I carried with me in my baggage my British accent. For a long while I didn't see it as a disadvantage. The standard BBC-type accent is well respected in Canada and in North America generally, so nobody suggested I change mine. Indeed I was approached by an eminent Polish economist to coach him in it, because he was a consultant to the United Nations, and the UNO bureaucracy – so he told me – preferred a British accent to an American one. So we swapped a veneer of British accent for the elements of cost benefit analysis. But when I took up conference interpreting I decided I had to modify it. It's a process, sometimes conscious but often not, called linguistic accommodation. I did it because it distracted listeners from giving their full attention to the speakers, and that shouldn't happen.

My awakening came at a three-day meeting of the Council of Ministers of Education, where I was the sole interpreter from French to English. Canada has no national ministry of education because, by its Constitution, education is an area to which each constituent province retains exclusive rights; nevertheless the provincial ministers meet several times a year to coordinate. The discussions take place in English except when the ministers from Quebec are speaking. Even if the latter do know English, politics require that they speak only in French, and only a minority of the other ministers understand French. So I had an attentive audience. At the last session of those meetings it was the custom for one of the ministers to say a few words of thanks to the interpreters. But on this occasion the minister added something unexpected. He said (paraphrase):

We thank the interpreters. But I must say I found it very odd to listen to my colleague from Quebec speaking English for these last three days with a perfect British accent.

And everybody laughed, so I knew he wasn't alone.

What other principles can we lay down for Experts besides avoiding accent shock of the above kind?

The great divide in English is between British, or British derived (eg Australian), and North American. As Oscar Wilde famously said, "The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language." Furthermore, on the British side, accent is particularly indicative socially and disapprovals are strong. The Guardian Unlimited recently asked readers if they had encountered prejudice because of their accent. The conclusion from their responses was that approved accents include those inculcated by a 'public school' plus Oxbridge university education and the so-called 'liberal' professions like law. Disapproved include 'working class' ones like those current in industrial cities like Glasgow or Manchester. The two last are also strongly marked geographically.

Your accent still goes to the heart of who you are. It locates you not just geographically, but economically and socially too.

Upwardly mobile people often 'iron out' their accent accordingly. Non-native TESOL teachers often remain blissfully ignorant of all this. But Expert Interpreters are supposed to be highly educated, well paid people working in national and international settings. They should sound like that and, once again, their trainers should pay attention to it.

To be continued. The continuation will touch on French and Spanish.

References
Press Association. Lincoln: Walking Dead accent shock. The Argus (UK), 4 October 2013. It's the only other occurrence Google could find of the term accent shock.
Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. www.cmec.ca.
Lucy Mangan. The language barrier. Guardian Unlimited, 24 August 2013.

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Source: amristo.wordpress.com