In other words - In the Brain of the real time Translator

Not even the most powerful computers in the world can be faithful real-time translations, and however, the performers do it with ease.

Author of the article in English:

A summer morning I visited the office of the United Nations in London. The headquarters of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) lies on the South Bank of the Thames, a short distance upstream of the houses of the British Parliament.

As he was approaching me, I realized that the bow of a boat, sculpted in metal, was inserted, as if it were a nose, in the ground floor of this building, which otherwise would have seemed simple.

Inside I found about a dozen of translators of the IMO. They were smiling and were better dressed than one would have hoped for people who is heard but rarely seen.

I went upstairs to go to glass cockpits that I prepared to witness something so absolutely extraordinary as completely routine.

The cabin was slightly larger than a phone booth, very bright but poorly ventilated. Under us were desks carefully placed in a semicircle of the representatives. Almost half were occupied by men dressed in suits.

I sat behind two performers whose names were Koko and Carmen Malin, and representatives immediately began to speak. Koko went on his microphone. He stopped for a moment and then began to be translated into the Spanish representative said in English.

Now we will analyze step by step what the translator made that morning and we will classify the parts of the process in detail.

While the representative pronounced his speech, Koko had to search for the meaning of a message made in a source language. At the same time, I had to interpret and articulate the message in another language. The process required of an extraordinary mixture of sensory, motor and cognitive skills, all of them had to work in unison.

The interpreter did continually and in real time, without asking the rapporteur that slow progress or that clarification as to nothing. Not he stuttered and stopped.

Nothing in our evolutionary history can have programmed Koko brain for a so peculiar and exhausting task. Carry out require a versatility and nuances that are outside the scope of the most powerful computers.

A miracle is to his brain, in fact, that any human brain, can do all this.

Neuroscientists have decades researching the language and have developed numerous studies on multilingual speakers. However, understanding this process, the simultaneous interpretation, it is a still greater scientific challenge. So many things are that occur in the brain of an interpreter which is difficult even know where to start.