The Protocol

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 5: The Protocol

The protocol was written. It existed as a document — the ICC Interpreter Guidelines, forty-three pages, updated annually, distributed to all staff interpreters and freelance interpreters contracted for specific trials, a document that Amara had read in her first week at the court and that she had read again every year when the updated version was circulated, not because the updates were substantial — they were usually minor, a clarification of terminology here, a procedural adjustment there — but because the rereading was itself a protocol, a ritual of professional practice, the way a pilot reread the pre-flight checklist before every flight even though the pilot knew the checklist by heart, the rereading not for information but for discipline, the discipline of not assuming that knowledge was permanent, that the mind could be trusted to remember without being reminded.

Rule One: Translate everything. This was the foundational rule, the rule from which all other rules derived, the rule that was both the simplest and the most difficult, because "everything" was a word that contained more than it appeared to contain. Everything meant every word spoken by the witness, the prosecutor, the defense counsel, the judge, the registrar, the victims' legal representative. Everything meant every pause, every hesitation, every false start, every repetition. If the witness said "I saw — I saw — the soldiers, they — I saw the soldiers coming," the interpreter translated: "I saw — I saw — the soldiers, they — I saw the soldiers coming." The hesitation was not edited. The repetition was not smoothed. The words were carried across the bridge exactly as they were spoken, including the cracks in the words, the fractures, the moments when the speaking faltered because the thing being spoken about was too large or too painful or too present in the speaker's body to be spoken about smoothly.

Everything also meant every non-verbal event that was relevant to the record. If the witness wept, the interpreter said: "The witness is crying." If the witness paused, the interpreter said: "The witness has paused." If the witness looked at the accused, the interpreter said: "The witness is looking at the accused." These narrations — the translation of the visual into the verbal, the conversion of the witness's body language into the interpreter's spoken language — were part of the protocol because the court's record was audio, not video, and the audio needed to contain the information that the video would have conveyed, the tears and the pauses and the looks that were part of the testimony even though they were not words, that communicated something the words alone could not communicate, that existed in the space between the linguistic and the physical, the space where the body spoke what the mouth could not.

Rule Two: Do not summarize. The temptation to summarize was real, especially during long testimony, especially during the passages when a witness described events in repetitive detail — the soldier did this, and then the soldier did this, and then another soldier did this — the repetition a feature of traumatic memory, which did not organize itself chronologically or thematically but associatively, the mind returning to the same moment from different angles, the same event described and re-described, the re-description not redundancy but circling, the witness circling the event the way a person circles a dark room, looking for the door, trying different walls, touching the same surfaces multiple times because the room was dark and the door was not where the person expected it to be. The interpreter did not summarize the circling. The interpreter translated every circuit, every return, every re-touching of the surface that the witness had already touched, because the circling was the testimony, and the testimony was what the court required, and the court required it in full.

Rule Three: Do not editorialize. The interpreter did not add. The interpreter did not subtract. The interpreter did not modify, adjust, improve, clarify, or explain. If the witness used a word that the interpreter believed was inaccurate — if the witness said "gun" when the interpreter believed the witness meant "machete" — the interpreter translated "gun." If the witness made a grammatical error, the interpreter replicated the grammatical error. If the witness used an obscenity, the interpreter used the equivalent obscenity in the target language, and the equivalent was determined by the interpreter's judgment, which was the one form of judgment the interpreter was permitted to exercise — the judgment of equivalence, the determination that this word in this language corresponded to that word in that language, a determination that was never exact, never perfect, never beyond dispute, but that was the best the interpreter could do, and the best was the protocol's standard.

Rule Four: Maintain the register. If the witness spoke formally, the interpreter spoke formally. If the witness spoke colloquially, the interpreter spoke colloquially. If the witness's language was elevated, literary, precise, the interpreter's language was elevated, literary, precise. If the witness's language was rough, fragmented, ungrammatical, the interpreter's language was rough, fragmented, ungrammatical. The register was part of the meaning. A witness who described a massacre in formal, controlled language was communicating something different from a witness who described the same massacre in broken, chaotic language — the formality communicated control, the chaos communicated overwhelm, and the communication was relevant to the court's assessment of the testimony, and the interpreter was the mechanism through which the communication was preserved, the register carried across the bridge along with the words.

Rule Five: Signal when unable to continue. The raised hand. The gesture that meant: I have reached my limit, I need my partner to take over, the thirty-minute rotation is not sufficient, the testimony has exceeded my capacity before the rotation has arrived. The raised hand was not failure. The protocol was explicit about this — the raised hand was a professional judgment, a recognition that accuracy was degrading, that the interpreter's resources were depleted, that continuation would compromise the translation and therefore the record and therefore the proceedings. The protocol encouraged the raised hand. The protocol required that booth partners be attentive to each other's state, ready to take over at the raised hand, ready to continue the translation without a perceptible break, the transition from one interpreter to another seamless in the headphones of the court, the voice changing but the translation continuing, the bridge remaining open even as the bridge-builder changed.

Amara had never raised her hand.

This was a fact she carried with a complex mixture of pride and suspicion — pride because the not-raising meant she had maintained her accuracy, her composure, her capacity through twelve years of testimony, through thirty-two trials, through hundreds of witnesses, through the particular accumulation of horror that the ICC's docket represented; suspicion because the not-raising might mean something else, might mean not that her capacity was greater than other interpreters' but that her threshold for recognizing depletion was higher, that she continued when she should have stopped, that the accuracy she believed she was maintaining was degrading in ways she could not perceive, the way a person with gradually failing eyesight does not notice the degradation because the degradation is gradual, because each day's vision is only slightly worse than the previous day's, and the slightly worse is not perceptible, and the imperceptible accumulates until the person is reading with glasses she did not know she needed.

Marcus had raised his hand three times. He had told her about each time, not as confession but as instruction, as the older interpreter teaching the younger one. The first time was during his fourth trial, in 2007, during the testimony of a child soldier — a boy, fourteen, who described in Swahili the things he had been forced to do, the killing, the carrying of ammunition, the specific tasks assigned to child soldiers by the militia that had recruited him, and the specific tasks were described in the specific language of a child, a child's vocabulary applied to adult violence, and the child's vocabulary had broken Marcus, had exceeded his capacity, because the child's words were too small for the things they described, and the smallness of the words made the things larger, made the things unbearable, and Marcus had raised his hand.

The second time was in 2012, during a sexual violence testimony — a woman describing what had been done to her, the description clinical in places and chaotic in others, the clinical places harder than the chaotic places because the clinical meant the woman had organized the horror, had arranged it into a narrative she could deliver, and the organization was itself a horror, the effort of organizing the unorganizable, and Marcus had raised his hand because the organization had entered his translation and the organization was too heavy to carry and speak at the same time.

The third time was in 2019, during a testimony that Marcus described as "ordinary." The witness was a man describing the burning of his house. Not a massacre, not sexual violence, not child soldiers — a house burning. And Marcus, who had translated massacres and sexual violence and child soldiers, had raised his hand during the testimony about a burning house, because the ordinariness of the house — the description of what was in the house, the furniture, the cooking pots, the children's school uniforms — had exceeded his capacity in a way that the extraordinary had not, because the ordinary was where the witness lived, the ordinary was the life before the violence, and the ordinary converted into ash was harder to translate than the violence itself, because the violence had its own vocabulary, its own grammar, its own established pattern in the interpreter's mind, but the cooking pots and the school uniforms were specific to this witness, specific to this house, specific to this life, and the specificity was the weight that broke the bridge.

Marcus had told Amara this and Amara had listened and Amara had understood and Amara had continued to not raise her hand, not because she believed Marcus was wrong but because she believed that her mechanism was different, that her threshold was different, that her capacity was calibrated differently, and the different calibration was not better or worse but different, the way different instruments had different ranges, a cello playing lower than a violin, the difference not a hierarchy but a fact of construction.

But sometimes — and this was the thing she did not tell Marcus, did not tell Dr. Brandt, did not tell anyone — sometimes in the booth, during testimony, she felt the hand begin to rise. Not physically — her hands remained on the console, on the edge of the desk, in her lap, wherever her hands were resting while she spoke into the microphone. But internally, inside the body, in the space where the physical and the psychological met, she felt a rising, a lifting, a movement toward the signal that would mean I cannot continue, a movement that she suppressed not by force but by attention, by redirecting her awareness from the content of the testimony to the mechanics of the translation, from what the witness was saying to how she was converting it, the shift in attention a technique she had developed over years, a technique that was not in the protocol because the protocol could not contain it, because the technique was personal, individual, the particular strategy that this particular interpreter had devised for this particular problem, the problem of carrying the testimony without being broken by it.

The protocol could not contain the technique because the protocol could not contain the human. The protocol was a set of rules, and the rules were necessary, and the rules were good, and the rules made the interpretation possible by making it consistent — every interpreter following the same rules, every translation governed by the same principles, the consistency the court's assurance that the translation was reliable, that the bridge was structurally sound. But the rules did not address the interpreter's interior. The rules addressed the output — what came through the microphone, the words and the register and the completeness — but not the input, not what happened when the testimony entered the interpreter's ears and traveled through the interpreter's mind and settled in the interpreter's body. The protocol governed the translation. The protocol did not govern the translator.

This gap — between the governed translation and the ungoverned translator — was the space where the work's cost accumulated. The cost was not in the speaking. The speaking was mechanical, trained, reliable, the output consistent day after day, session after session, trial after trial. The cost was in the carrying. The testimony entered through the ears and it did not leave through the mouth. The mouth produced the translation, but the translation was not the testimony — the translation was the testimony's shadow in another language, and the testimony itself remained in the interpreter's mind, in the interpreter's body, in the space between the ears and the mouth, the space where the seven languages lived, the space where the architectures of thought were built, the space that was Amara's interior, Amara's home, Amara's self.

The protocol said: translate everything. Amara translated everything. The protocol said: do not editorialize. Amara did not editorialize. The protocol said: maintain the register. Amara maintained the register. The protocol said: signal when unable to continue. Amara did not signal. The protocol did not say: absorb everything. But Amara absorbed everything. The protocol did not say: carry the testimony in your body after the session ends. But Amara carried the testimony in her body after the session ended. The protocol did not say: dream the witness's words. But Amara dreamed the witness's words, sometimes, the dreams not nightmares exactly but re-translations, the mind continuing the work of the day in the sleep of the night, the testimony replayed and re-translated, the translation refined, improved, perfected in the dream in a way that was not possible in the booth, because in the booth the translation was simultaneous and therefore imperfect and the imperfection was the protocol's tolerance and the dream's intolerance, the dream demanding a perfection that the booth could not achieve.

The protocol was updated annually. The updates were minor. The updates addressed the output. The updates did not address the interior. The interior was addressed by Dr. Brandt, by the ICC's staff psychologist, who conducted sessions with interpreters and who knew what the work did and who had written papers about what the work did and whose papers were cited in academic journals that studied the psychological effects of sustained exposure to traumatic testimony through the mechanism of translation, a mechanism that was different from the mechanism of direct exposure, because the translator did not experience the trauma but translated the trauma, and the translating was not experiencing but was also not not-experiencing, and the double negative was the space where the translator lived, the space that Dr. Brandt studied, the space that the protocol could not reach.

Amara thought about the protocol as she sat in the booth on the third day of the trial. The prosecution was presenting its evidence summary — a long document, read aloud by a member of the prosecution team, a catalog of the evidence the prosecution intended to present, including the witnesses it intended to call, the documents it intended to submit, the forensic evidence it intended to introduce. The reading was slow and methodical and Amara translated it from French to English with the steady rhythm of a person reading a text she had previewed, the translation predictable, manageable, the kind of translation that occupied the mechanical portion of her mind while leaving the reflective portion free, and the free portion reflected on the protocol, on the rules that governed her output and that did not govern her interior, on the gap between the translation and the translator, the gap that was the cost of the bridge.

She translated. She translated the evidence summary from French to English, the words crossing the bridge, the bridge open, the protocol satisfied. She translated the names of witnesses — Witness 112, Witness 155, Witness 247, the witnesses identified by number rather than by name, the numbering a protection, a protocol of its own, the witness's identity concealed from the public because the witness's safety required concealment, because the witness was testifying against an accused war criminal and the accused war criminal's allies were still in eastern Congo and the allies would harm the witness if they knew the witness's identity, and so the witness was a number, and the number was the protocol's anonymity, and the anonymity was the protocol's protection, and the protection was necessary.

Witness 247. Amara translated the number. The number was a number. The number did not weigh anything. The number did not carry anything. The number was three digits that identified a person without revealing a person, the way a case number identified a trial without revealing a trial. But behind the number was a person, and behind the person was a testimony, and behind the testimony was an experience, and behind the experience was a village in eastern Congo where something had happened that the court was assembled to judge, and the judging required testimony, and the testimony required translation, and the translation required Amara, and Amara sat in the booth and translated the number and waited for the person behind the number to appear, to sit in the witness box, to speak into the microphone, to begin the testimony that Amara would carry across the bridge.

The protocol was clear. Translate everything. Do not summarize. Do not editorialize. Maintain the register. Signal when unable to continue.

The protocol was clear. The protocol was insufficient. The protocol governed the output. The translator governed herself.

And the governing — the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute effort of governing herself, of maintaining the separation between the translation and the translator, of carrying the testimony without being broken by it, of speaking the words without being consumed by the words — the governing was the work that the protocol could not see, the work that the protocol could not measure, the work that existed in the gap between the rules and the human, the gap that was the translator's silence.