73 years ago today ...

73 years ago today (on 12 November 1948), the last word on the verdicts was spoken at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial)  

I read an interesting book on the Tokyo Trial l which casts a new light from a linguist’s point of view.
The book, “Interpreting at the Tokyo Trial” by K. Takeda (published by Misuzu Shobo) 東京裁判における通訳（武田珂代子著／みすず書房）
analyzes the work of #interpreters , so-called monitors and linguist arbiters at the Tribunal in detail.

At first, I expected to read about a high-level #interpreting technique. Instead, I found an in-depth socio-political study on interpreters in international conflicts that goes back as far as to the Ottoman Empire.

The book made me think a lot about the meaning of neutrality for interpreters. The author distinguishes between #heteronomous and #autonomous interpreters depending on the degree of confidence that their employers have in them.

In the world of commercial Japanese/German interpreting – in a world much much smaller in scale, I admit - I often heard from my colleagues that German clients prefer to work with German native interpreters while Japanese clients with Japanese natives. Of course, it may simply because people prefer to hear native output. But – whether conscious or not - its root may run deeper.

I don’t go into detail here since the book is inaccessible to non-Japanese readers. Just let me quote one passage (translated freely by me) about which the author seems to feel particularly strong:

… with such wartime experiences, second-generation <Japanese American> interpreters worked at the Tokyo Trial Tribunal for judging former leaders of their parents’ homeland as hired hands of their mother country <the US> which treated them unduly during the war - by levering their <linguistic> competence deeply embedded in their roots.

If you think of the fate of locally hired Afghan interpreters these days, this passage starts to resonate in your mind with new relevance.

#tokyotrial #monitor #davidakiraitami #neutrality #imtfe #interpreters