Clutching the pillow, I wake up with a start from this classic simultaneous interpreter nightmare. <...> I worked as a staff interpreter at the UN for 25 years, trying to convert the knots and twists of Russian and French sentences into intelligible and, I hope, fluent English; I’ve also translated books and articles. <...> He also has a desk, entire shelves full of dictionaries, a computer and a telephone. <...> How can you compare the life of this coddled creature with the lot of the miserable, pressured interpreter who has only the words and phrases stored in his brain to rely on? <...> Interpreters usually work in pairs but when we’re actually interpreting we’re on our own, hidden away from the audience inside soundproof ‘booths’, claustrophobically small cubicles containing two chairs, two consoles, two headsets, two microphones, and a window that provides an excellent view of the backs of the delegates’ heads and of the podium at the front of the room. <...> The booths are marked with the name of the target language: English-booth interpreters interpret into English, French-booth interpreters into French. <...> The six booths correspond to the UN’s six official languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. <...> International organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund also use these languages at their conferences. <...> But the most important language in most international organisations has no name: it is the institution’s own bureaucratese, its linguistic Esperanto. <...> We’ve been compared to air traffic controllers juggling fifty flights at once, or less flatteringly, to parrots or ventriloquists’ dummies. <...> A colleague once suggested that the interpreter is like * This article from the London Review of Books (Vol. 35, No 21, 7 November 2013) is reprinted with permission from the LRB. 156 Lynn Visson. <...> Instead of beginning his speech with the usual ‘Thank you, Mr Chairman,’ a Russian delegate for whom I was interpreting launched in with ‘O my lost youth, my lost youth,’ and proceeded to reminisce about the mosaics in the main cathedral in Sofia, including one figure in the cupola that reminded him, as he put it, of ‘Christ in a space suit’. <...> Several delegates turned towards the English booth with puzzled looks, undoubtedly wondering if I had gone mad. <...> You can never <...>