Fiona Hill

And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture.

Consecutive translation is different.

You know, kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood of like big chunks of dialogue that have already been there.

But, you know, sometimes you might not get that right either.

And it breaks up the flow of the discussion.

And often it's, you know, the kind of the person who translates it's different.

You know, some of our best translators are women.

But, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking and a macho way of speaking and a crude way of speaking, you know, be that Putin or I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, you know, and it gets translated by a much more refined, you know, female speaker.

You've just lost the whole thing.

And, you know, many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope they are.

It's not just that they're not native speakers.

They're just not trained to the same high standards they used to be in the past.

And you just lose the nuance, you lose the feel.

You know, you almost need, you know, kind of the interpretive actor, you know, doing, you know, the kind of the interpretation.

You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you, you know, do voiceovers in film.

The best way to talk to Putin is one-on-one in his own language.

I mean, I have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters of Putin.

He's often asked by the media to interpret for him, which is just a...

He was at the Institute that I was at.

I mean, I know him from that kind of period.