The interpreter’s pause

Text: an original contemporary meeting-report-style practice extract.

The chairperson had promised a short meeting. After the first speaker finished, he began calling the next name while the interpreter was still speaking. The interpreter lifted a hand. For a moment, the room seemed to be waiting for words it had already heard.

It had not. Half the listeners had heard the speaker’s language; the others were still receiving the explanation in theirs. When the chairperson allowed the interpretation to finish, a listener asked about the date attached to a proposal. The question exposed a disagreement between two documents on the table. We spent another five minutes resolving it. The pause had lengthened the meeting and prevented us from approving something we had not all understood in the same way.

Speed remained useful. Nobody wanted the meeting to become an evening of avoidable repetition. But interpretation was not repetition for the people who needed it. On the revised agenda, we allowed time after each contribution. The empty spaces looked inefficient on paper. In the room, they were part of making the discussion available.

In this extract, the writer tries to show the value of allowing time for interpretation.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.