On Language 4/20: Filming ‘The Interpreter’
Interpreters, translators play vital but different roles
Chicago Tribune, April 20, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Before you make a movie called “The Interpreter,” you have to get one thing straight. An interpreter is not the same as a translator.
That’s what the makers of “The Interpreter,” which opens Friday, learned as they made the first movie filmed at the United Nations in New York.
“After they understood the difference between interpreters and translators, they stopped calling us translators,” says Brigitte Andreassier-Pearl, the UN’s chief of Interpretation Services, who consulted with director Sidney Pollack and actress Nicole Kidman in the making of “The Interpreter.”
Interpreters are in charge of interpreting spoken communication as it happens on the UN floor. Translators work with written documents, under far less time pressure. ...
Kidman, cast as a UN interpreter who accidentally overhears a secret threat on an African president’s life, had her definitions down when she arrived at UN headquarters to observe interpreters at work. She spent a morning in the glass booth of the Security Council, studying the interpreters and asking them questions. Then she sat down to interview Andreassier-Pearl, a French native with a PhD in French literature who has worked at the UN for 34 years.
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