The cough button

Thirty minutes is the turn, and thirty minutes is the real limit, not a union convention.

Past that the head starts handing over the wrong thing: a number swapped, a negative dropped, the verb in a tense it never had. People who work alone for four hours think they are doing fine. They are, inside their own head.

The booth is two metres by two, with glass onto the room, two consoles, two sets of headphones and its own air conditioning that nobody has ever managed to set properly.

Túlio and I have been sharing this one for four days.

It is an arbitration. Three arbitrators, two parties, a hearing room on the fifteenth floor of a law firm, with a blind window and bad coffee.

We work Portuguese and English. When the Russian party speaks, nobody on this side understands a word: the Russian booth takes it into English, and I take their English and hand over Portuguese.

That is called relay. It means whatever comes out of my mouth has already been through somebody else, and the lag doubles, and if the colleague in the other booth gets it wrong then I get it wrong too, with conviction.

It is not a comfortable arrangement. It is the arrangement.

"The claimant reiterates that the notice of 14 March was received and was at no point answered."

That was me. The voice is mine, the breathing is mine, the choice of reiterates over repeats is mine. None of the rest is.

The console has a button to the left of the microphone that cuts the channel while it is held down. It is there for coughing, for clearing your throat, for swearing when a speaker reads a memorised text at two hundred words a minute.

While it is held down, the room hears nothing of what is said in here.

Booth people learn to use it with a fluency that unsettles outsiders. You are speaking to four hundred people in their headsets, you press a button, you say to your colleague give me the figure, give me the figure, you let go, and you carry on the sentence at the exact point you left it.

Túlio has a very good hand for it. He presses and releases without a click, and the click shows up on the recording.

On the first day he pressed it to tell me I had said limitation where the term was preclusion. I corrected it on air without anybody noticing, which is what you do.

On the second day he pressed it to say my voice was better than it had been that morning and that I must have slept.

I had not slept.

About the body, which no interpreting course explains.

Two metres by two with two consoles leaves about forty centimetres between one chair and the other. The microphone sits in front of each of you, and to reach your colleague's button, when it is urgent, you cross that gap.

Whoever is on turn cannot move much, because office chairs creak and the creak goes down the channel. So the one who is off turn is the one who moves: fetches water, turns the page of the glossary, touches the shoulder of whoever is speaking to signal five minutes left.

Touching the shoulder is protocol. We did it about forty times in four days.

And there is the décalage, which is the lag between what the speaker says and what I hand over. About three seconds, four on relay. Inside those three seconds I am holding a whole sentence in my head that has not finished yet, in another language, while speaking the previous one out loud.

That is why a tired interpreter swaps a figure. And it is why nobody in a booth can pay attention to anything else: whatever happens in there happens between two people who both have no attention left over at all.

"The tribunal denies the request for an extension and directs that the hearing proceed."

That was me as well, Thursday, ten past eleven in the morning.

On the Thursday afternoon the Russian party made its closing submission, which ran an hour and forty without a break.

An hour and forty on relay is the worst job there is. I took twenty-five minutes, he took twenty-five, and by the third round I no longer knew whether I was interpreting or repeating.

At ten to four the feed from the Russian booth went down.

When the relay drops, there is nothing the interpreter can do. You announce that the interpreter has lost sound and you wait for the technician. The whole room goes without Portuguese and nobody on the tribunal knows why.

It took eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes with both microphones closed, inside a glass box two metres square, with forty people on the other side of it looking at the arbitrators and not one of them looking this way, because nobody looks at the booth.

The cough button was not used, because there was no channel to cut.

The booth's own air conditioning, which nobody has ever managed to set properly, was sitting at nineteen degrees.

When the sound came back the technician said so over the intercom and I said we were ready.

The first sentence I interpreted after that was about default interest.

Friday was the last day and it was short: replies, a timetable for written submissions, closing.

The recording of the hearing stays with the tribunal and has four channels. On the Portuguese channel there are eleven minutes of silence on the Thursday afternoon, logged in the minutes as a signal failure.

Túlio lives abroad and does this kind of case about six times a year. I live here. We will cross paths again, because the market is small, and neither of us is going to arrange anything.

At twenty past five on the Friday the president of the tribunal spoke the last sentence of the hearing, and it was my turn.

"There being nothing further, I thank you all and declare this session closed. You may remove your headsets."