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The amazing brains of the real-time interpreters

By Geoff Watts

The world s most powerful computers can t perform accurate real-time

interpreting of one language to another. Yet human interpreters do it with

ease. Geoff Watts meets the neuroscientists who are starting to explain this

remarkable ability.

One morning this summer I paid a visit to the sole United Nations agency in

London. The headquarters of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) sits

on the southern bank of the Thames, a short distance upstream from the Houses

of Parliament. As I approached, I saw that a ship s prow, sculpted in metal,

was grafted like a nose to the ground floor of this otherwise bland building.

Inside I met a dozen or so mostly female IMO translators. They were cheerful

and chatty and better dressed than you might imagine for people who are often

heard but rarely seen.

I walked upstairs to a glass-fronted booth, where I prepared to witness

something both absolutely remarkable and utterly routine. The booth was about

the size of a garden shed, and well lit but stuffy. Below us were the gently

curving desks of the delegate hall, which was about half-full, occupied mostly

by men in suits. I sat down between two interpreters named Marisa Pinkney and

Carmen Solino, and soon the first delegate started talking. Pinkney switched on

her microphone. She paused briefly, and then began translating the delegate s

English sentences into Spanish.

(Thinkstock)

Let s unpick what she did that morning and itemise its components.

As the delegate spoke, Pinkney had to make sense of a message composed in one

language while simultaneously constructing and articulating the same message in

another tongue. The process required an extraordinary blend of sensory, motor

and cognitive skills, all of which had to operate in unison. She did so

continuously and in real time, without asking the speaker to slow down or

clarify anything. She didn t stammer or pause. Executing it required

versatility and nuance beyond the reach of the most powerful computers. It is a

wonder that her brain, indeed any human brain, can do it at all.

Intriguing region

Neuroscientists have explored language for decades and produced scores of

studies on multilingual speakers. Yet understanding this process simultaneous

interpretation is a much bigger scientific challenge. So much goes on in an

interpreter s brain that it s hard even to know where to start. Recently,

however, a handful of enthusiasts have taken up the challenge, and one region

of the brain the caudate nucleus has caught their attention.

The caudate isn t a specialist language area; neuroscientists know it for its

role in processes like decision making and trust. It s like an orchestral

conductor, coordinating activity across many brain regions to produce

stunningly complex behaviours. Which means the results of the interpretation

studies appear to tie into one of the biggest ideas to emerge from neuroscience

over the past decade or two. It s now clear that many of our most sophisticated

abilities are made possible not by specialist brain areas dedicated to specific

tasks, but by lightning-fast coordination between areas that control more

general tasks, such as movement and hearing. Simultaneous interpretation, it

seems, is yet another feat made possible by our networked brains.

(Science Photo Library)

Simultaneous interpretation often evokes a sense of drama. This may be because

of its history: the creation of the League of Nations after World War I

established the need for it on a large scale, and use of the technique during

the trials of senior Nazis at Nuremberg showcased its power. Doubts about

accuracy lingered nonetheless; the UN Security Council didn t fully adopt

simultaneous interpretation until the early 1970s. Until then they didn t

trust the interpreters, says Barbara Moser-Mercer, an interpreter and

researcher at the University of Geneva. But now the two traditional capitals of

the multilingual conference world the UN offices in Geneva and New York

have been joined by Brussels, as the expanding European Union incorporates more

and more languages. The current total is 24, and some meetings involve

interpretation of every one.

Looking down over the delegates at the IMO, I was reminded of the view from a

captain s bridge, or the gallery of a television studio. I had a feeling of

control, a perverse reaction given that control is one thing interpreters lack.

The words they utter and the speed at which they talk are determined by others.

And even though Pinkney and Solino had copies of some of the speeches that had

been prepared for that morning, they had to be alive to humorous asides. Puns,

sarcasm, irony and culture-specific jokes are an interpreter s nightmare. As

one interpreter has noted in an academic article, Puns based on a single word

with multiple meanings in the source language should generally not be attempted

by interpreters, as the result will probably not be funny. Quite.

Humorous pitfalls

Many of the delegates spoke in English, so the pressure on Anne Miles in the

into-English booth down the hall was sporadic. Miles speaks French, German,

Italian and Russian, and has been interpreting for 30 years. In between

translating she told me about word order, another challenge that interpreters

face daily. With German the nicht , the not , can come at the very end of

the sentence. So you may be enthusing about something and then the speaker

finally says nicht . But if you re a German native you can hear the nicht

coming by the intonation. Word order is a particular problem in fish meetings,

which Miles said she dreads. In a long sentence about a particular variety of

fish, and in a language where the noun the name of the fish comes towards

the end, the interpreter is left guessing about the topic of the sentence until

it s completed.

There s humour in these pitfalls, of course. Miles told me about an

agricultural meeting at which delegates discussed frozen bull s semen; a French

interpreter translated this as matelot congel s , or deep-frozen sailors .

And she shared an error of her own, produced when a delegate spoke of the need

to settle something avant Milan before Milan , the city being the venue

for a forthcoming meeting. Miles didn t know about the Milan summit, so said

that the issue wasn t going to be settled for mille ans , or a thousand years

(Science Photo Library)

Several areas of the brain are involved when the interpreters are working in

real time (SPL)

Some speakers talk too fast. There are various strategies. Some interpreters

think it s best just to stop and just say the delegate is speaking too fast.

Miles herself doesn t find that useful because people have a natural pace, and

someone asked to slow down is likely to pick up speed again. The alternative is

to precis. You have to be quick on the uptake. It s not just language skills

in this job, it s being quick-brained and learning fast.

Challenges of this kind make simultaneous interpretation tiring, and explained

why the two interpreters took it in turns to rest every half an hour. Watching

by video is even worse. We don t like it at all, Miles told me. Studies

confirm that the process is more exhausting and stressful, probably because

body language and facial expressions provide part of the message, and are

harder to decipher when working remotely. You get fewer visual clues as to

what s going on, even with a video link, said Miles.

Then there s the tedium. Crisis talks in New York might be gripping, but the

average politician, never mind the average technical expert on marine

regulations, isn t likely to induce rapt attention for hours on end. The

audience may slumber, but the interpreter must remain vigilant. As the meeting

sailed on into a polyglot fog of procedural niceties and resolutions, each with

sections and subsections, I realised how tiring this vigilance must be. Having

nodded off in many a science conference even once when chairing I was in

awe of the interpreters fortitude.

Mental networks

Moser-Mercer trained as an interpreter she is fluent in German, English and

French before being sidetracked by neuroscience. I got very intrigued with

what was going on in my brain while I was interpreting, she says. I thought

there has to be a way to find out. When she arrived at the University of

Geneva in 1987 there wasn t a way the interpretation department was concerned

with training, not research. So she set out to create one by collaborating with

colleagues in the brain sciences.

Language is one of the more complex human cognitive functions, Narly

Golestani, the group leader of the university s Brain and Language Lab, tells

me during a recent visit. There s been a lot of work on bilingualism.

Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active

simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and

production at the same time. So the brain regions involved go to an extremely

high level, beyond language.

In Geneva, as in many other neuroscience labs, the tool of choice is functional

magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using fMRI, researchers can watch the brain

as it performs a specific task; applied to interpretation, it has already

revealed the network of brain areas that make the process possible. One of

these is Broca s area, known for its role in language production and working

memory, the function that allows us to maintain a grasp on what we re thinking

and doing. The area is also linked with neighbouring regions that help control

language production and comprehension. In interpretation, when a person hears

something and has to translate and speak at the same time, there s very strong

functional interplay between these regions, says Golestani.

(Thinkstock)

In Geneva, researchers studied what was happening in the minds of multilingual

students (Getty Images)

Many other regions also seem to be involved, and there are myriad connections

between them. The complexity of this network deterred Moser-Mercer from

tackling them all at once; unravelling the workings of each component would

have been overwhelming. Instead the Geneva researchers treat each element as a

black box, and focus on understanding how the boxes are linked and coordinated.

Our research is about trying to understand the mechanisms that enable the

interpreter to control these systems simultaneously, says team member Alexis

Hervais-Adelman.

Two regions in the striatum, the evolutionarily ancient core of the brain, have

emerged as key to this executive management task: the caudate nucleus and the

putamen. Neuroscientists already know that these structures play a role in

other complex tasks, including learning and the planning and execution of

movement. This means that there is no single brain centre devoted exclusively

to the control of interpretation, say Hervais-Adelman and his colleagues. As

with many other human behaviours studied using fMRI, it turns out that the feat

is accomplished by multiple areas pitching in. And the brain areas that control

the process are generalists, not specialists.

(Thinkstock)

One of the triggers of this piece was a trivial conversation. Someone told me

of a simultaneous interpreter so proficient that he could do a crossword while

working. No name or date or place was mentioned, so I was sceptical. But just

to check I contacted a few professional interpreters. One thought he might have

heard a rumour; the others were dismissive. An urban myth, they said.

I ask Moser-Mercer if interpreters ever do anything else while interpreting. In

a job dominated by women, she tells me, some knit or used to when it was a

more popular pastime. And you can see how a regular manual action might

complement the cerebral activity of interpreting speech. But a crossword

puzzle? Moser-Mercer hasn t tried it, but she tells me that under exceptional

circumstances a familiar topic, lucid speakers, etc. she thinks she could.

That such a feat might be possible suggests that interesting things are indeed

happening in the brains of simultaneous interpreters. And there are other

reasons for thinking that interpreters brains have been shaped by their

profession. They re good at ignoring themselves, for example. Under normal

circumstances listening to your voice is essential to monitoring your speech.

But interpreters have to concentrate on the word they re translating, so they

learn to pay less attention to their own voice.

Predicting speech

This was first demonstrated 20 years ago in a simple experiment devised by

Franco Fabbro and his colleagues at the University of Trieste in Italy. Fabbro

asked 24 students to recite the days of the week and the months of the year in

reverse order while listening to themselves through headphones. First they

heard themselves with no delay. They then repeated the exercise with delayed

feedback of 150, 200 and 250 milliseconds. Even a slight delay subverts speech,

forcing listeners to slow down, stutter, slur and even come to a halt. Sure

enough, many of the students made errors. But half of the group were in their

third or fourth year at the university s School of Translators and

Interpreters, and these students suffered no significant disruption.

Some habits acquired in the workplace may carry over to the home. One way that

experienced interpreters acquire speed is by learning to predict what speakers

are about to say. I will always anticipate the end of a sentence, no matter

who I m talking to and whether or not I m wearing a headset, says

Moser-Mercer. I will never wait for you to finish your sentence. Many of us

interpreters know this from our spouses and kids. You never let me finish

And it s true. We re always trying to jump in.

(Thinkstock)

Interpreters also have to be able to cope with stress and exercise self-control

when working with difficult speakers. I read one article, based on

questionnaires given to interpreters, which suggested that members of the

profession are, as a consequence, highly strung, temperamental, touchy and

prima donna-ish. Maybe. But I couldn t see it in Marisa, Carmen or Anne.

A few years ago, the Geneva researchers asked 50 multilingual students to lie

in a brain scanner and carry out a series of language exercises. In one,

subjects merely listened to a sentence and said nothing. Another involved the

students repeating the sentence in the same language. The third was the most

onerous: subjects were asked to repeat what they were hearing, this time

translating it into another language.

Changing brains

In cognitive terms this seems like a big step up. Initially the students just

had to listen, and then to repeat. Task three required them to think about

meaning and how to translate it: to interpret simultaneously. But the scans

didn t reveal any neural fireworks. There wasn t a huge amount of additional

engagement, says Hervais-Adelman. No extra activity in regions that handle

comprehension or articulation, for example. It was just a handful of specific

regions that were handling the extra load of the interpreting. These included

areas that control movement, such as the premotor cortex and the caudate.

Interpretation, in other words, may be about managing specialised resources

rather than adding substantially to them.

This idea remains unconfirmed, but the Geneva team added weight to it when they

invited some of the same students back into the fMRI scanner a little over a

year later. During that period, 19 of the returnees had undergone a year of

conference interpretation training, while the others had studied unrelated

subjects. The brains of the trainee interpreters had changed, particularly

parts of the right caudate, but not in the way you might expect activity

there lessened during the interpretation task. It is possible that the caudate

had become a more efficient coordinator, or had learned how to farm out more of

the task to other structures.

It could be that as people become more experienced in simultaneous

interpretation there s less need for the kind of controlled response provided

by the caudate, says David Green, a neuroscientist at University College

London who was not involved in the Geneva work. The caudate plays a role in

the control of all sorts of skilled actions. And there s other work showing

that as people get more skilled at a task you get less activation of it.

(Science Photo Library)

fMRI scans on the brains of interpreters has shed more light on what it is

doing when carrying out such complex activity (SPL)

The story that is emerging from the Geneva work that interpretation is about

coordinating more specialised brain areas seems to gel with interpreters

descriptions of how they work. To be really effective, for example, a

simultaneous interpreter needs a repertoire of approaches.

The process has to adapt to varying circumstances, says Moser-Mercer, who

still does 40 to 50 days of interpretation a year, mainly for UN agencies.

There could be poor sound quality, or a speaker with an accent, or it might be

a topic I don t know much about. For instance, I wouldn t interpret a fast

speaker in the same way I would a slow one. It s a different set of strategies.

If there isn t time to focus on each and every word that comes in you have to

do a kind of intelligent sampling. It may be that the flexible operation of

the brain networks underpinning interpretation allows interpreters to optimise

strategies for dealing with different types of speech. And different

interpreters listening to the same material may use different strategies.

(Science Photo Library)

The caudate was involved when rats considered whether to press a lever in lab

tests (SPL)

The results from the Geneva group also fit with a wider theme in neuroscience.

When fMRI became widely available in 1990s, researchers rushed to identify the

brain areas involved in almost every conceivable behaviour (including, yes,

sex: several researchers have scanned the brains of subjects experiencing an

orgasm). But on their own those data didn t prove terribly useful, partly

because complex behaviours don t tend to be controlled by individual brain

areas. Now the emphasis has shifted to understanding how different areas

interact. Neuroscientists have learned that when we consider a potential

purchase, for example, a network of areas that includes the prefrontal cortex

and insula helps us decide whether the price is right. Interplay between

another set of brain areas, including the entorhinal cortex and the

hippocampus, helps store our memories of routes between places.

Meaning and intent

This more sophisticated understanding has been made possible in part by

improvements in scanning technology. In the case of the caudate, activity there

can now be distinguished from that in other parts of the basal ganglia, the

larger brain area within which it is located. The finer-grained scans have

revealed that the caudate is often involved in networks that regulate cognition

and action, a role that puts it at the heart of an extraordinarily diverse

range of behaviours. As a team of British researchers noted in a 2008 review,

studies have shown that the caudate helps control everything from a rat s

decision to press a lever to a human s decision about how much to trust a

partner in a financial exchange .

One of the review s authors was John Parkinson of Bangor University in Wales. I

ask him if he would have predicted that the caudate would be involved in

simultaneous interpretation. He says that at first he wouldn t have. The

caudate is involved in the intentionality of an action, in its

goal-directedness. Not so much in carrying it out but in why you re doing it.

Then he thought about what interpreters do. Computers translate by rote, often

with risible results. Humans have to think about meaning and intent. The

interpreter must actually try to identify what the message is and translate

that, says Parkinson. He agrees that the involvement of the caudate makes

sense.

(Thinkstock)

Given that the Geneva research is based partly in a department tasked with

training interpreters, it s natural to wonder if their scientific findings

might eventually find a direct practical application. Moser-Mercer and her

colleagues are careful to avoid extravagant claims, and rule out suggestions

that brain scanners might be used to assess progress or select candidates with

an aptitude for interpreting. But even if studying simultaneous interpretation

doesn t lead to immediate applications, it has already extended our knowledge

of the neural pathways that link thinking with doing, and in the future it may

help neuroscientists gain an even deeper understanding of the networked brain.

The Geneva team wants next to explore the idea that some high-level aspects of

cognition have evolved from evolutionarily older and simpler behaviours. The

brain, they suggest, builds its complex cognitive repertoire upon on a lower

level of what they call essential processes, such as movement or feeding.

This would be a very efficient way to do things, Moser-Mercer and her

colleagues tell me in an email. It makes sense for the brain to evolve by

reusing or by adapting its processors for multiple tasks, and it makes sense to

wire the cognitive components of control directly into the system that will be

responsible for effecting the behaviour. Simultaneous interpreting, with its

close back-and-forth relationship between cognition and action, may be an ideal

test bed for such thinking.