SlavFlle, Spring 1998

A Tangled Tale of Three Languages

The events described here took place in the spring of 1997, in a large city on the East Coast of the United States. A large non-profit organization was preparing to receive a delegation from recently independent and fiercely nationalistic Ukraine. The delegation would attend professional meetings scheduled to last about three weeks. The organization had engaged as an administrative assistant an émigré from Kiev, who claimed fluency in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. She phoned the members of the delegation before they embarked for the United States to ask whether they would prefer interpretation from English into Russian or into Ukrainian.

Now, as Russian was her mother tongue and Ukrainian her second language, she had grown somewhat unaccustomed to speaking Ukrainian during her time in the U.S. So, when she called the delegation, she sheepishly crept into an unoccupied office at the back of the suite and carefully closed the door, so that her American employers would not hear her speaking in Russian rather than Ukrainian (just in case they could even tell the difference). In response to the question about their preferred target language for interpretation, all the delegates, in keeping with the new, independent spirit of the times, responded firmly in favor of Ukrainian.

A team of Ukrainian simultaneous interpreters was duly hired. This team included one recent émigré from Eastern Ukraine, who later confessed that his Ukrainian was in fact a dialect known as Surzhik, a mongrel breed of mixed Sovietized Ukrainian and Russian. (Note: surzhik was originally an agricultural term referring to a mixture of grains fed to livestock.) He was counting—correctly as it turned out—on his American clients not knowing the difference.

The delegates arrived as scheduled and the meetings got under way. By the afternoon of the first day, it was apparent that most of the visitors were in fact far more comfortable in Russian than in Ukrainian. Although they understood the Ukrainian interpreters, more or less, all but two of the ten made their comments and replies in Russian, which the Ukrainian interpreters then rendered into English, to the best of their ability. Some of the delegates even surreptitiously requested that the Ukrainian interpreters (most of whom had been drawn from the city's proud and very traditional Ukrainian community, dating back to World War II) interpret from English into Russian, which most of the interpreters were either unable or unwilling to do.

This situation eventually came to the attention of the American hosts, and the delegation members were once again asked to state their preference. The visitors repeated firmly that they preferred interpretation into Ukrainian. However, in a secret ballot, cannily suggested by one of the Americans, only two of the ten requested Ukrainian, while the remainder asked for Russian. (All of these eight pretended that they were one of the two requesting Ukrainian, but everyone had a pretty clear idea who was who.) With the exception of the Surzhik-speaker, whose mother tongue was Russian, the Ukrainian interpreters were compensated and let go. Russian interpreters were hired to replace them.

What is the moral of this story? We leave that question up to you, our readers.