A prime ministerial interpreter and interpreting risk
A weekend report in The Australian has raised questions about whether the foreign university affiliations of an interpreter for successive Australian prime ministers are a national security issue.
The fact that successive Australian leaders – from Bob Hawke to John Howard, Tony Abbott and Anthony Albanese – have reportedly used the same interpreter, Charles Qin, in full view of intelligence agencies, suggests the answer is no.
There may be times when the decision about who interprets in a meeting between presidents, prime ministers and other leaders is a matter of national security.
History is littered with examples. But nothing suggests anything like those instances is the case with the Australian government’s choice of interpreter for top-level meetings with China.
In World War II, Gottlieb Fuchs, a Swiss citizen working as an interpreter for the Gestapo commander in occupied France, was a secret triple agent, also working for the French Resistance and Swiss authorities.
In the Cold War, a Czech translator was recruited by the KGB and infiltrated the CIA for years until his arrest in 1984 for passing secrets to Moscow.
In the Second Iraq War, military contractor linguists were investigated and prosecuted by the FBI and stripped of fraudulently obtained citizenship after being accused of having dual loyalties and stealing classified documents.
And in December 2017, Stanislav Yezhov, a personal translator and aide to then Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Groysman, was arrested for treason, having worked for Russian intelligence for years.
These cases all involved interpreters, translators and linguists with access to classified documents and state secrets – in other words, the ability to obtain and transfer information that could harm national interests.
But this is not the case where a role is limited to interpreting or translating a diplomatic meeting.
In the case of Mandarin–English interpreter Qin, each occasion would have at least been authorised, if not recommended, by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and accepted by intelligence agencies. It means trust in Qin is considered adequate and that risk has been assessed as low enough to be manageable. Assuming of course that all of his foreign affiliations have been disclosed.
For transparency, it’s helpful that The Australian has reported that Qin holds visiting appointments at Chinese universities that ASPI’s China Defence Universities Tracker rates ‘very high risk’. But this should be put in context.
The Tracker risk rating attaches to an institution, not to everyone who has ever stood in a lecture theatre associated with it. Work history of course matters. But individuals born, or who have worked or studied, in China should be treated on their own merits. And great care should always be taken to distinguish the Chinese Communist Party from people who are Chinese by citizenship or ethnicity.
ASPI produces the Tracker to help universities, companies and policymakers engage with China’s research system with eyes open. It sorts institutions, not individuals, by the risk of the Chinese government using the relationship for military or security purposes. Governments, universities and companies dealing with Chinese entities should use the Tracker as a due diligence tool, not as an automatic blacklist. Its purpose is to help in risk navigation, not risk avoidance, as a means of promoting confidence in engagement.
The Tracker tells you that Sichuan University, where Qin was a visiting professor, has defence and security links worth taking seriously. We would advise an Australian university or state or federal body to form no agreement with such a defence-related Chinese organisation, because doing so could create a systemic risk. But this does not necessarily extend to a professional relationship with individuals associated with such organisations, such as visiting professors.
Additionally, all of China’s top universities are included in the Tracker and have at least some links to China’s security and defence sectors. It would not be in Australia’s broader interests to assume that all of China’s most talented individual students and professors are therefore suspect.
The Tracker is only one among many sources of information with which universities, public servants and companies should assess whether an individual associated with an institute should be engaged and, if so, to what extent.
The role of an interpreter will depend on context. If he or she is only in the diplomatic meeting itself, the risk is far less than being an adviser in the prime minister’s office or an official in DFAT. Having been present in such interactions, we well know that an interpreter used solely for meeting interactions is not a fly on the wall with access to the deliberative process behind the words. That is, the interpreter is not in the preparatory meetings involving strategy, tactics and classified intelligence. He or she hears only what the principals decide to put on the record, in front of the other side, precisely because it is meant to be communicated. That means any exposure is bounded by design.
This is not to say there are no risks. Politicians and officials can say things when they think the other side has left the room.
The most likely risk of translation mishap comes from unintended misinterpretation or literal translations. In November 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev spoke at a reception in Moscow and quoted Marxist theory to say that socialism would survive longer than capitalist systems. The interpreter translated the phrase word-for-word into English as ‘We will bury you.’ After Western audiences took it as an implied nuclear threat, Khrushchev had to clarify.
More embarrassingly, during Jimmy Carter’s 1977 visit to Poland, his freelance interpreter, Steven Seymour, made several mistranslations, including that Carter had not just left the US for Poland ‘this morning’ but ‘forever’ and instead of expressing Carter’s interest in the Polish people’s ‘desires for the future,’ the interpreter made it sound as though Carter wanted to touch Polish people sexually.
Of course, presidents and prime ministers should ensure they trust interpreters who are speaking for them.
One option to be considered is creating a government Mandarin interpretation service for the prime minister, foreign and defence ministers, employing only interpreters with security clearances. DFAT, with support from intelligence agencies, could run this.
Even then, don’t miss the forest for the trees. The interpreters in a diplomatic meeting between Australian and Chinese leaders are important but comparatively low on the spectrum of national security threats. At the end of the meeting, perfect translation would matter more if leaders such as President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi themselves talked honestly and if they actually carried out their promises on topics such as human rights, cyberspace and military affairs.
In this way, the interpreter matters, but it is more important that Australia prepares for China’s actions, not words.
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