The Booth

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 1: The Booth

The booth is glass on three sides and concrete on the fourth, where the wall meets the building's infrastructure — the ducts and wiring and climate-control apparatus that keeps the International Criminal Court at a regulated twenty-one degrees Celsius, year-round, regardless of whether the testimony being delivered in the courtroom below concerns a massacre in equatorial heat or a forced march through mountain rain. The temperature is controlled because the court's architects understood, or were advised by someone who understood, that the administration of international justice requires physical comfort, that the body must be at ease so the mind can attend to the precise and often unbearable work of determining whether the accused committed crimes against humanity, and whether those crimes can be proven beyond reasonable doubt through testimony delivered in languages the judges may not speak, translated by interpreters the judges cannot see, into headphones the judges wear with the same unselfconscious regularity with which they wear their robes.

Amara Osei entered the booth at 8:47 AM on a Monday in March. She entered from the corridor side — the concrete side — through a door that locked automatically behind her, a soft click that she had heard perhaps four thousand times in her twelve years at the ICC and that she no longer registered as sound, the way one no longer registers the sound of one's own breathing or the hum of a refrigerator in a kitchen where one has lived for years. The click was the threshold. Before the click, she was a woman in a corridor, walking on gray carpet under fluorescent light, carrying a leather satchel containing a thermos of rooibos tea, a notebook she rarely used, two pens, and a laminated copy of the day's witness list. After the click, she was the voice.

The booth measured approximately three meters by two meters. Two chairs, ergonomic, adjustable, upholstered in a dark blue fabric that showed wear at the armrests where interpreters gripped during difficult testimony. A console between the chairs: microphone controls, volume dials for the headphone feed, a small screen displaying the courtroom audio channels, and a button — red, slightly raised — that activated or deactivated the interpreter's microphone. When the button was pressed and the microphone was live, everything Amara said entered the headphones of everyone in the courtroom who had selected the English channel. The judges. The prosecution. The defense. The accused. The gallery. Everyone heard Amara's voice, and no one saw Amara's face, because the glass was one-way — she could see out, they could not see in — and this arrangement, the visibility without reciprocity, the voice without the body, was the architecture of interpretation at the ICC, an architecture that made the interpreter simultaneously essential and invisible, the most heard and least seen person in the room.

She sat in the left chair. The left chair was hers by habit, not by rule. Twelve years of sitting in the left chair had made the left chair hers the way a particular pew in a church becomes the parishioner's pew — through repetition, through the body's memory of the specific angle of the seat, the specific distance to the console, the specific view through the glass. From the left chair, Amara could see the judges' bench directly ahead and slightly below, three judges in black robes seated behind a long curved desk of pale wood. To the left of the judges' bench, the prosecution table. To the right, the defense. Between the prosecution and the defense, slightly forward, the witness box — a chair, a microphone, a small table for water. Behind the witness box, the gallery: rows of seats for observers, journalists, family members of victims, law students, diplomats, the assorted human audience that international criminal justice both requires and accommodates.

And to the right of the defense table, set apart, the dock.

The dock was where the accused sat. It was not a cage — the ICC had made deliberate architectural choices to distinguish itself from tribunals that placed the accused behind bars during proceedings — but it was bounded, a defined space with a low wooden barrier on three sides and a security officer seated just outside. The accused sat in the dock with headphones on, receiving the translation of everything said in the courtroom, and the headphones were the accused's link to the proceedings, because the proceedings might be conducted in a language the accused did not speak, and the right to understand one's own trial was a right the court protected with the same rigor it applied to the right to counsel and the right to remain silent.

Amara's partner for the morning session was Fatima Diop, a Senegalese interpreter who handled French-to-English and English-to-French. Fatima entered the booth three minutes after Amara, carrying a paper cup of coffee from the ICC cafeteria and a folder of documents she would not open. They nodded to each other. The nod was the greeting. In twelve years, Amara had learned that booth partners communicated primarily through gestures — nods, hand signals, the raised hand that meant I need you to take over, the slight shake of the head that meant I can continue — because the booth, when the microphone was live, was a space where the only permissible speech was the translation, and all other communication had to be conducted in the language of the body.

Fatima sat in the right chair. She put on her headphones. Amara put on hers. The headphones were circumaural — they covered the entire ear, creating a seal that blocked ambient sound and delivered the courtroom audio directly into the ear canal with a clarity that was, after twelve years, still startling, the way a voice heard through good headphones seems to originate not from a speaker but from inside the listener's own head. This was, Amara had thought more than once, an apt metaphor for interpretation itself: the voice of the witness entered the interpreter's head through the headphones, and the interpreter's translation exited through the microphone into the headphones of the court, and the entire process was conducted inside heads, the sound traveling from head to head through wires and frequencies, never touching the open air of the courtroom, never existing as the kind of sound that fills a room the way a shout fills a room or a cry fills a room. The sound was contained. The testimony was contained. The horror was contained in headphones and translated in booths and recorded in transcripts, and the containment was the court's technology for processing what would otherwise be unprocessable — the raw and unmediated voice of a person describing the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

The courtroom filled. Amara watched through the glass. The prosecution team entered first — four lawyers in dark suits, carrying binders and laptops, arranging themselves at their table with the organized efficiency of people who had been preparing for this trial for three years. The lead prosecutor was a Belgian woman named Claire Devaux, tall, silver-haired, deliberate in her movements, the kind of lawyer who arranged her papers in a specific order before every session and who would notice if a single page was out of place. Behind the prosecution, the victims' legal representatives — two lawyers who represented the interests of the victims as a group, a provision of the ICC's Rome Statute that gave the victims not just a voice through their testimony but a presence through their counsel.

The defense entered next. Two lawyers and a paralegal. The lead defense counsel was a Frenchman, Henri Laporte, who had defended accused persons at the ICC and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia before it. Laporte was small, precise, known for his cross-examinations, which were conducted in French with a specificity of language that made translation both easier and harder — easier because his words were chosen carefully and therefore had clear equivalents, harder because the careful choosing was itself a tool, a weapon, and the interpreter had to translate the weapon without dulling or sharpening it.

Then the gallery. They came in groups and individually, finding seats, adjusting headphones, settling into the particular posture of courtroom observers — attentive, still, aware that they were present at a proceeding that demanded a certain comportment, a certain respect for the gravity of the room. Amara saw journalists with notebooks. She saw a group of Congolese women in bright fabrics — victims' family members, she knew, because she had seen family members in thirty-two trials over twelve years, and they always carried themselves in a particular way, a way that combined the exhaustion of travel with the alertness of people who had come a very long distance to hear the court say what they already knew, which was that something terrible had been done to them.

The judges entered. The courtroom rose. Judge Okonjo, the presiding judge, was in the center — a tall Nigerian man with close-cropped gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a face that conveyed authority through its stillness rather than through any particular expression. He had been a judge at the ICC for nine years. He had presided over four trials. He was known for his patience, his precision, and his insistence that every procedural requirement be met, not because procedure was more important than justice but because procedure was the mechanism through which justice was administered, and the mechanism had to function correctly for the justice to be credible. To his left, Judge Herrera, a Colombian woman. To his right, Judge Tanaka, a Japanese man. Three judges. Three nationalities. Three legal traditions. The bench was the world in miniature, or at least the world's attempt at a miniature that could sit in judgment of the world's worst crimes.

The courtroom sat. Judge Okonjo adjusted his microphone. The sound of the adjustment — a small scrape, a click — entered Amara's headphones with the intimacy of all courtroom sounds, sounds that were not meant to be intimate but became intimate through the headphones, through the proximity of the sound to the ear, through the particular closeness that the technology created between the courtroom and the booth.

And then the accused was brought in.

Colonel Jean-Pierre Mukiza entered the courtroom through a side door, escorted by two ICC security officers in dark suits. He was not in handcuffs — the ICC did not use visible restraints in the courtroom, another architectural choice, another deliberate signal that the accused was presumed innocent until proven guilty and that the courtroom was a place of law, not punishment. Mukiza was wearing a dark gray suit, a white shirt, a burgundy tie. He was fifty-five years old. He was tall — six feet two, Amara estimated, though she had read the detention records and knew his exact height was listed there. His hair was cropped short, graying at the temples. His face was composed. Composed was the word Amara used in her own mind, because composed carried the connotation of arrangement, of deliberate construction, and Mukiza's face was arranged — the expression was not natural but chosen, the way a diplomat's expression is chosen, the way a man who has been advised by lawyers arranges his face for the courtroom.

He sat in the dock. He put on his headphones. He selected the French channel. He would hear everything in French — either spoken directly in French by French-speaking participants, or translated into French by the interpreters in the French booth. Amara's translations — English — would not reach Mukiza's ears directly. Her translations would reach the English-speaking judges, lawyers, gallery members. But there was a relay: when a witness spoke in Lingala, Amara would translate from Lingala to English, and a colleague in the French booth would translate from the English relay into French, and that French would enter Mukiza's headphones. Or sometimes the relay went differently — Lingala to French directly if a French-booth interpreter spoke Lingala, and then Amara would take the French and render it into English. The relay system. The chain of translations. The witness's words passing through two or three interpreters before reaching every ear in the courtroom, each interpreter adding a layer of precision and a layer of distance, the precision and the distance inseparable, the way the lens of a telescope brings a distant object closer while simultaneously reminding the viewer that the object is distant.

Amara watched Mukiza adjust his headphones. She watched his fingers — large, thick-knuckled, the hands of a man who had been a soldier before he was a colonel before he was an accused war criminal sitting in a courtroom in The Hague wearing a suit his lawyers had chosen. His fingers adjusted the headphones the way anyone adjusts headphones: pressing them against the ears, tilting them slightly, finding the position where the sound is clearest and the pressure most comfortable. It was a banal gesture. It was the same gesture made by the judges, by the gallery, by everyone in the courtroom who wore headphones. And the banality was the thing Amara noticed, because the banality meant that in the gesture of adjusting headphones, the accused was indistinguishable from the judge, the perpetrator indistinguishable from the observer, and the indistinguishability was not a moral equivalence but a technological one — the headphones did not know who was wearing them, the translation did not know who was hearing it, the interpreter's voice entered every ear with the same frequency and the same clarity and the same neutrality.

Judge Okonjo spoke. His voice entered Amara's headphones. He spoke English — accented, Nigerian, the English of a man who had been educated at the University of Lagos and at Cambridge and who had practiced law in Abuja and The Hague and whose English carried the sediment of all those places. He said: "This court is now in session. The case of the Prosecutor versus Jean-Pierre Mukiza. Case number ICC-01/04-02/23."

Amara pressed the red button. Her microphone went live. She was now the voice. She translated Judge Okonjo's English into — but no, the judge was speaking English, and Amara's channel was English, and so she sat with her microphone live and waited, because when the source language and the target language were the same, the interpreter was silent, and the silence was part of the work, the waiting was part of the work, the readiness to speak was part of the work even when speaking was not required.

The registrar read the charges. The charges were read in English and French simultaneously — two registrars, two languages, the dual-language protocol of the ICC, which operated in both English and French as its official languages. Amara listened to the English. She would be needed when the French was spoken — to translate the French into English for the English channel. But for now the English was being spoken in English, and she waited.

The charges: Count One, crimes against humanity, murder, pursuant to Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute. Count Two, crimes against humanity, extermination, pursuant to Article 7(1)(b). Count Three, crimes against humanity, persecution, pursuant to Article 7(1)(h). Count Four, war crimes, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, pursuant to Article 8(2)(e)(i). Four counts. Four articles. Four formulations of the same event — the massacre of civilians in villages in Kisangani Province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, between March and June 2018. Three hundred and forty people killed. An unknown number displaced. An unknown number of women subjected to sexual violence. The numbers were in the charges. The numbers were precise in some places (three hundred and forty killed) and imprecise in others (an unknown number), and the precision and the imprecision were both true, because some things could be counted and some things could not, and the court worked with what could be counted while acknowledging what could not.

Amara had read the charges before. She had read the pre-trial briefs, the witness summaries, the background materials the ICC provided to interpreters assigned to a case. She knew the case the way an interpreter knows a case — not as a lawyer knows it, concerned with evidence and precedent and strategy, but as a linguist knows it, concerned with terminology and context, with the specific vocabulary the witnesses might use, with the specific dialects of Lingala spoken in eastern Congo, with the specific military terminology of the Forces de Liberation militia that Mukiza had commanded. She had prepared. Preparation was the work before the work, the study that made the translation possible, because translation was not the real-time conversion of one word into another but the activation of an entire context — historical, cultural, linguistic, emotional — that allowed the interpreter to find not just the right word but the right weight of the word, the right register, the right silence around the word.

The charges were read. The accused was asked whether he understood the charges. Mukiza's lawyer, Laporte, stood. He spoke in French. Amara's booth activated. She pressed the button — but it was already pressed, the microphone already live, and so she spoke, translating Laporte's French into English as Laporte spoke, the simultaneous translation that was the core of her skill, the act of listening in one language and speaking in another at the same time, the divided attention that was not divided but unified in a different way, a way that people who did not do this work could not understand and that people who did this work could not fully explain.

Laporte said, in French, that his client understood the charges and pleaded not guilty to all counts.

Amara said, in English, into her microphone, into the headphones of the English channel, that the defense counsel stated that the accused understood the charges and entered a plea of not guilty to all counts.

The translation was accurate. The translation was always accurate, or as accurate as simultaneous interpretation could be, which was very accurate but not perfectly accurate, because perfection in translation was a theoretical condition that existed only in the imagination of people who had never translated, who believed that languages were parallel systems with one-to-one correspondences, that every word in French had exactly one equivalent in English and that the interpreter's job was simply to substitute one for the other, the way a currency exchange substitutes euros for dollars at a fixed rate. But languages were not parallel. They were not even comparable geometries. They were different worlds that happened to overlap in places, and the interpreter's job was to navigate the overlap and to bridge the gaps where the worlds did not touch, and the bridging was an act of judgment, and the judgment was invisible, and the invisibility was the booth, the one-way glass, the voice without the body.

Amara released the microphone button. Fatima would handle the next segment — they rotated every thirty minutes, one active, one resting, because the cognitive load of simultaneous interpretation was such that accuracy degraded after thirty minutes of continuous work, the mind tiring in a way that was different from physical exhaustion, a mental fatigue that manifested not as inability but as imprecision, the words coming a fraction of a second slower, the synonyms less exact, the sentences slightly restructured to accommodate the interpreter's fatigue rather than the speaker's intent. The thirty-minute rotation was not a preference but a protocol, researched and established, the court's recognition that the interpreter was a human instrument and that human instruments required maintenance.

Fatima took over. Amara removed her headphones — not fully, just slid them back so they rested behind her ears, the sound still audible but muffled, the courtroom's proceedings continuing at a remove. She looked through the glass. She looked at the courtroom the way she had looked at it for twelve years — from above, from behind glass, from the position of the unseen voice. The courtroom was a theater of law, and she was not in the audience and not on the stage but in the wings, or above the wings, in the lighting booth, controlling something essential that the audience experienced without seeing its source.

She looked at Mukiza. He sat in the dock with his headphones on, listening to the French translation of the proceedings. His face was still composed. His hands were in his lap. He was watching the judges. He was a man accused of ordering the deaths of three hundred and forty people, and he was sitting in a chair in a building in The Hague, wearing a suit, listening to headphones, watching judges, and the ordinariness of the scene — the chair, the suit, the headphones, the watching — was the particular ordinariness of international criminal justice, which processed the extraordinary through the ordinary, which took the massacre and converted it into charges and testimony and translation and verdict, which took the violence and ran it through the machinery of law until it emerged as a judgment, a sentence, a number of years.

Amara reached for her thermos. She poured rooibos tea into the thermos cap, which served as a cup. She drank. The tea was warm, earthy, the taste of South Africa, which was not one of her seven languages but which she associated with rest, with the particular rest of drinking tea in the booth during the thirty minutes when her partner was active and she was waiting, the waiting that was not idleness but recovery, the body and mind preparing for the next thirty minutes of carrying words from one language to another, from one world to another, from the witness's mouth to the court's record.

The booth was warm. The climate control kept the ICC at twenty-one degrees, but the booth, enclosed on three sides by glass and on one by concrete, with two bodies and their attendant heat, was always warmer — twenty-three, twenty-four degrees. The warmth was a fact she had stopped noticing years ago and that she noticed now, in this moment, on this Monday in March, at the beginning of a trial that would last months, that would bring witnesses from eastern Congo to this building in The Hague to sit in the witness box and speak into a microphone and describe what had happened to them in languages Amara spoke, and Amara would sit in this booth and put on these headphones and press this button and open her mouth and translate, and the translation would be the bridge, and the bridge would be invisible, and she would be the bridge, and she would be invisible, and the invisibility was the booth, and the booth was where she was sitting now, drinking rooibos tea, looking through one-way glass at a courtroom where a man was about to be tried for crimes against humanity, and the tea was warm, and the glass was clear, and the trial was beginning.