Wanted: English speakers with fluency in sarcasm

But the question is being tossed out to a bunch of young people who do need to come up with an answer to this, indeed to any linguistic riddle thrown at them, and they have to do so instantly.

The eight sitting around the table in this Russian session at Leeds University with various shades of alert anxiety on their faces are training for an occupation in crisis. They want to be interpreters.

Of all the lubricants of international affairs, interpreting is most crucial, which makes the shortage of people who can do it is so serious. A proliferation of post-war international organisations such as the United Nations and the European Union fuelled a demand for multilingual interpreters, says Dr Svetlana Carsten, director of the interpreting postgraduate programme at Leeds. A decent flow of applicants emerged to take up these jobs from the earliest university interpreting courses set up in the 1960s.

Retirement is looming for this generation but latterly there simply haven't been the numbers coming through to replace them. The average age of the interpreters working at the European commission in Brussels, for instance, is now over 58, and this at a time when the numbers of languages spoken at meetings there has reached 23.

"More and more people are claiming their language rights," says Brian Fox, director of interpretation at the commission. "The Welsh, for instance, have contacted us about the possibility of having Welsh interpreting. Irish was added a couple of years ago and the Spanish government has requested Basque, Galician and Catalan." The biggest demand, however, is for interpreters who have English as their first language and fluency in two others.

Loss of numbers

"We don't have every language at every meeting but English is in 99.9% of meetings," says Fox. "Last year the head of English translation at the United Nations in Geneva said he was going to lose 60% of his staff in the next five to 10 years and there was insufficient succession."

Interpreters fall broadly into two categories: conference interpreters, who work at the UN, EU and other major international organisations, and public service interpreters, who work in a variety of settings including courts and hospitals.

It is the conference interpreters, typically working in sound-proof booths providing simultaneous spoken translations of proceedings in the adjoining room, who arguably require the greatest skills. They facilitate business at the highest international levels, in sessions covering everything from cross-border security to the minutiae of fishing policy. Such skilled operators can expect to earn up to about £50,000.

The work is so demanding and the need for precision so great that conference interpreters translate into their mother tongues. "If you get a word wrong at the UN you can have diplomats knocking at your door shouting to get it sorted out," says Laurence Binnington, visiting professor in the Russian department at the Monterey Institute's school of interpretation in California, the only graduate school for interpreters in the United States.

Carsten blames the education system for the fact that, for instance, on the Leeds programme this year there are only three graduates with mother tongue English training to interpret from German. There is an immediate crisis in the numbers of German-English interpreters. Almost as serious is French-English shortage. Spanish is so far OK. "Spanish is seen as much more sexy and easier," she says.

The government's decision in 2004 that a modern language should no longer be compulsory at GCSE was fatal, in her view. "You need to do a language up to 16 at least."

The subsequent decline in numbers taking foreign languages in secondary school has had a knock-on effect with the closure of a number of university departments, notably for Russian and Arabic.

"There's a malevolent conjunction of factors," says Fox. "Native English speakers convince themselves that there's no need to speak other languages because everybody speaks English, and that they themselves are not good at languages. Both of these are wrong."

The earlier academic specialisation in Britain than in other countries also contributes, he reckons. If they haven't been dropped earlier, languages tend to go at 16 when students choose their three or four A-levels. "It's very difficult to get top marks in languages," he says. "You can get full marks in science but nobody gets full marks in languages."

In February, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) is funding the creation of a national network for interpreting, bringing together the four English universities with postgraduate programmes: Leeds, which is leading the network, Bath, Salford and Westminster. A virtual learning system linking the four will enable them to run interactive discussions and record real events for students to interpret. The network will do missionary work in schools and colleges to encourage more youngsters to study languages.

With such a serious interpreter shortage, those leaving Leeds having completed their one-year MA in interpreting should be strolling into jobs. But there is another problem. Over the last five years, Carsten says, the Leeds postgraduate programme has had about 30 students with mother tongue English and two eligible EU or UN languages. She has recommended only 16 of these to sit the European commission's test to be accredited as interpreters. Only a half of them have been accepted.

Poor command of English

One of the prime reasons has been their inadequate command of their own language, English. For whatever reasons - they haven't read enough, they have spent too much time in front of screens, they don't converse discursively with their families as a matter of course, or have not been taught English adequately at school - the graduates coming on to the interpreting courses lack vocabulary, accuracy, fluency and verbal dexterity in their mother tongue.

"What young people wanting to work as interpreters don't realise is that we judge them on their mother tongue," says Carsten. Their other languages, which they will be listening to rather than speaking in their professional work, can be improved. Though the unit spends a lot of time trying to remedy deficiencies in English, in many cases it is too late.

Many of the young hopefuls cannot speak in the appropriate "register" for the event they would be interpreting. Their only modes of speech are informal, peppered with "like", for instance, she says. They misuse words and don't know the subtle differences between synonyms.

"The sort of language that is used at the commission can be high-faluting, difficult, complex, sometimes deliberately abstruse," says Binnington, adding that the register problem for would-be interpreters is even worse in the US. Sometimes a more colloquial translation is needed.

"Understanding the language being translated is only half the battle," says Fox. The interpreter's other equally important half is conveying the "pitch", ie how the speaker is delivering what is spoken. Are they speaking defensively, say, or apologetically or sarcastically? The ability to convey such nuances is lacking in too many candidates.

Simultaneous interpreters need to be mentally nimble. Carsten reminds her students time and again that if an unexpected word is uttered by a speaker that doesn't exist in their mother tongue they must instantly conjure up an equivalent word or phrase.

So, what about sub-prime mortgage? Without a blink, she says: "Zaemy s visokim riskom" (high-risk lending).

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