2. 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.