The European Parliament is the greatest place on earth for practising the highest arts of fast and accurate interpreting: hundreds of interpreters are on hand when the Parliament is sitting to help get the 23 official languages each translated as necessary into any one of 22 other languages.

Sometimes a ‘relay’ is used: if there is no interpreter who knows eg both Latvian and Hungarian to the required standard, a Latvian MEP’s ringing words will be interpreted into (say) accurate English and then interpreted on with very little delay into Hungarian by a Hungarian/English interpreter.

Phew.

But what exactly is said, and what is recorded?

Take this fascinating example.

In the EP in Wednesday UKIP’s Nigel Farage made some sharp remarks against the choice of people to fill the two top EU jobs:

And we have a new president of Europe, Herman Van Rompuy. It does not exactly trip off the tongue, does it? I cannot see him stopping the traffic in Beijing or Washington; I doubt anybody in Brussels would even recognise who he is. And yet he is going to be paid a salary that is bigger than Obama’s, which tells you all you need to know about this European political class and how they look after themselves.

But at least he is an elected politician, unlike Baroness Cathy Ashton, who really is the true representation of the modern‑day political class. In some ways she is ideal, is she not? …

She has risen without trace. She is part of this post-democratic age. She married well: she married an adviser, friend and supporter of Tony Blair and got put in the House of Lords. When she was in the House of Lords she was given one big job, and that job was to get the Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords and to do so pretending that it was entirely different to the EU Constitution.

So she is good at keeping a straight face, and she vigorously crushed any attempt in the House of Lords for the British people to have a referendum.

So here she is: never stood for public office, never had a proper job, and here she gets one of the top jobs in the Union. Her appointment is an embarrassment for Britain.

 

This prompted an intervention by one Edit Herczog, a ‘progressive’ MEP from Hungary who started off as a Hungarian Communist even when Hungarian Communism was in steep decline.

Such was her fury at Nigel Farage’s remarks that she had a go at him in English, not Hungarian.

The EP website helpfully gives us all various options for following MEPs and their pronouncements. Here is the relevant page with the links to individual speakers. You can either download the audio file for each intervention and listen to it, or watch it on video, or read a transcript.

This is what she said in fact:

 

Mr President, Mr Farage has said that those people they were elected last week are not those the traffic will stop to let them go, and this is why we elected them because we wanted to elect people who will make the traffic move for all European citizens to get a better life to themselves and this is what they will do. 

Mr Rompuy and Mr (sic) Cathy Ashton are four people (sic) and the four hundred eighty million European will know it soon.  

I think this is the stake, we have to stand for them we have to state, save their integrity, personal integrity and Mr Farage, I’d like to say something, Hungarian quotation for you, it’s good that you are here because if the monkey goes up to the tree it’s better seen how that is his popo (sic).

Heartfelt no doubt and a valiant effort (not easy to say all that in Hungarian if you are not Hungarian?), but still amusingly inaccurate. The general idea at the end appears to be that as a monkey climbs a tree its butt becomes all the more visible.

Anyway, the text transcript as recorded on the EP website has been obligingly ‘interpreted’ by someone from Herczoglish into something like real English:

Mr President, Mr Farage has said that those people who were elected last week are not people that the traffic will stop for. This is why we elected them – because we wanted to elect people who will make the traffic move for all European citizens to get a better life for themselves, and this is what they will do.

 

Mr Van Rompuy and Mrs Cathy Ashton are for the people, and the 480 million Europeans will know it soon. I think this is the stake. We have to stand up for them. We have to save their personal integrity. And, Mr Farage, I would like to quote a Hungarian saying to you. It is good that you are here because, if the monkey goes up the tree, it is easier to see its backside!

Interesting question for History. When someone in the EP says something hoplessly wrong in a language other than their own, is it right that the officially transcribed record edits out all the potentially embarrassing mistakes? 

But let’s be fair. Accurately recording what someone has said is not easy, even when people are speaking English in the House of Commons.