This week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the General Assembly at the United Nations. He had these “choice” words for the U.S.

Ahmadinejad (via translator): They sacrifice all the good things and the ¹⁾sublime in life for their own greed.

When Americans hear these ²⁾caustic remarks, we hear them in the voice of the interpreter. For instance, when Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, ³⁾denounced President Bush last year, he did so in these ⁴⁾dulcet female tones.

Chavez (via translator): The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house, and the Devil came here yesterday.

Interviewer: Welcome to the program.

Broch: Thank you.

Interviewer: Last year you ⁵⁾wind [wound] up getting Hugo Chavez and he starts talking about President Bush literally being “the Devil.” As you hear [heard] that, what was going on in your head?

Tica: Trying not to laugh. He had actually started by ⁶⁾wielding a book by ⁷⁾Noam Chomsky and explaining how interesting the book was. And then he suddenly launched into the President Bush and the Devil part.

Chavez (via translator): The President of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as “the Devil,” came here talking as if he owned the world.

Interviewer: You can hear it now in your voice. You almost sound a little bit surprised as you say, “the Devil.”

Broch: I was. I was…you know…sometimes we get speeches in advance, but that time we did not have a speech, and so I had no idea where he was going.

Interviewer: How do you deal with emotion in a speech? I mean, a lot of times you hear people literally doing translation and it’s very, kind of, flat and ⁸⁾monotone. But you definitely, you have a lot of emotion in your voice. How do you kind of regulate that?

Interviewer: Tica, what’s the biggest challenge of your job?

Broch: Hmm. Well, the accuracy, because, you know, nowadays there’s [there are] more and more countries—you know, we keep adding countries to the UN—but there is [are] the same three-hour meetings. And what they do nowadays is they just read their speeches really fast and they crowd in there all kinds of facts and figures and ¹³⁾acronyms and whatever, and so the greatest challenge is doing something with this ¹⁴⁾barrage of information that suddenly arrives. I mean, I’ve been in this business for almost 40 years, and, in the past, people spoke more slowly and there was more ¹⁵⁾rhetoric and less hard facts, so you could, if you cut a little ¹⁶⁾trimmings [trimming], there was still a lot left of what mattered. But nowadays there’s very little trimmings [trimming] and you can almost not cut anything. English you can usually say things with fewer words, so we’re lucky. But people who are doing from English back into, say, French or German or Spanish, they really…phew…you know, it’s exhausting.