Two wars currently have the world on edge, alongside many other armed conflicts that draw far less attention. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the long-running conflict between Israel and Palestine dominate the news in 2023. War, with all its harshness and devastation, is closely bound up with cultural conflict, clashes of identity and social problems. And here, translation and interpreting are vital.

Translators and interpreters play significant roles in situations of war and conflict, often facing extraordinary challenges and making crucial contributions to communication, diplomacy and history. Diplomacy and negotiations, humanitarian aid and wartime propaganda all have a great deal to do with languages and communication. And throughout history there have been many extraordinary events connected with all of this that have shaped the course of wars. Let us look at a few of them.

1. The Navajo code in the Second World War: During the Second World War, the United States recruited native Navajo speakers (a Native American language) to encode secret messages. These Navajo speakers created a code based on their language that proved impossible for enemy forces to break.
2. The battle of languages in the Cold War: During the Cold War, the CIA launched a machine translation programme known as the “Translation Machine Project” to decipher communications in Russian. The results, however, were often comical because of cultural and linguistic differences. Somewhere between fact and urban legend, the sentence “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (from the Gospel of St Mark) reached Russian communications literally (“дух бодр, плоть же немощна” in Cyrillic) and, when translated back into English, came out as “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.”
3. The interpreter Olga Tufnell in the First World War: The Russian interpreter Olga Tufnell became an iconic figure in the First World War. She served as an interpreter for the British general Edmund Allenby during the campaign in Palestine, playing a crucial part in the dealings between British forces and the Arab tribes.
4. Translators at the Nuremberg trials: The Nuremberg trials, which followed the Second World War, involved numerous translators and interpreters who played a fundamental role in interpreting testimony and evidence in several languages, ensuring a fair process.
5. Interpreters in the Vietnam War: The interpreters who worked with US forces in Vietnam faced extremely dangerous situations. Many of them became targets for the enemy because of their association with the US forces.
6. Cinema and translation: “The Interpreter” (2005) and “The Covenant” (2023) are two cinematic examples of the theme of interpreting and translation in times of war.