Bruce Boeglin

B.B. The experiences before I became an interpreter have been invaluable. I don't think you can be an interpreter without a certain baggage or luggage, if you like, that you carry around, от things that you've learned and forgotten, the way people behave, the things that people know the things that people say, the customs. All these things have been assimilated and when you go to a meeting you bring all that with you. There are only words I know, but interpretation is more than words.

Cor. But how much more? And what are the qualities needed for a good interpreter? We've grown used to seeing the same unnamed faces standing at the shoulder of, say, Reagan or Gorbachev at summit meetings. Without them those leaders would in effect be deaf and dumb. And they rely on them to capture any nuance of their exchanges with absolute accuracy. That's often easier said than done. As we shall hear in this series of conversations with those who've being in the front line of history from the dark days of World War II, through the Cold War and a break-up of the Soviet Union. We begin today with a man who had to exercise his craft through one of the most complicated and bloody conflicts since 1945 — the savage war over the body of former Yugoslavia. The French commander of the UN Forces in Bosnia, General Cotte, spoke virtually no English, the common language of many of his troops and some of his UN superiors. So he was heavily dependent on his interpreter Bruce Boeglin. The qualifications, Boeglin mentioned just now were ideal for this task. His bilingualism was a product of his parentage and his childhood experience.

B.B. I was brought up in the Pyrenees near Pau and you know that Henry the Fourth of France^ was born in Pau. He was christened with a cup of local red wine and garlic that rubbed on his lips to make quite sure that he had the spirit of the region in upbringing him. And I grew very much in that kind of atmosphere, 1 used to speak patois, the patois of the Pyrenees, when I was a kid. I was about 4 when I arrived there. It didn't mean that it shut up the English side because that was fine for lunches, but when it came to tea-time, (tea was more or less a religion at home), we also had a radio-set and of course we listened to the BBC short wave. It was awful: the crackling and all that kind of thing...

But we certainly had a taste of England in the middle of the Pyrenees. The war came along, lines were drown. In fact I was told in 1940 that the English were here "taking the bread out of our French mouths, and the English have betrayedus," so 1 was used to that kind of "xenophobism²", if I can pronounce the word, that the French had against the British, but when I landed in England I found the same thing existed about the French. So I thought that these are facts of life. And as a result I tried to keep away from interpreting because the interpreter sits in the middle and tries to make one side known to the other. And I was finding that I was giving myself too much to the others whoever they were and needed to build up my own little "niveau", a world of my own. So when in the army I was asked «Would you like to become an interpreter?" I said "Absolutely not. I want to get

¹ Генрих IV Наиарский.

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