Are you a language interpreter? Government is searching for people like you

Two years after a parliamentary standing committee rued “gross understaffing” in the Ministry of External Affairs’ interpreter cadre even as India’s global engagements and visits by foreign dignitaries increased significantly, the government has begun to feel the shortage of officials for the job across both foreign and Indian languages.

The Cabinet Secretariat last week called a meeting with officials of the ministries of external affairs and human resource development to review the shortage of foreign and Indian language interpreters. Both ministries have been asked to work out a roadmap to address the problem, ET has learnt.

The move comes days after the Union Cabinet approved the creation of new joint secretary-level posts in the interpreters’ cadre of the MEA, towards filling the gaps.


It is gathered that the PMO had flagged concerns over the decreasing pool of interpreters. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi prefers to speak in Hindi at many of his international visits and addresses, there is a need for well-versed interpreters who can do the translation effectively from Hindi.

Last week’s meeting called by the Cabinet Secretariat discussed how there were larger concerns over the decreasing pool of language interpreters with limited remuneration and lack of permanency of work. Also, limited opportunities to those pursuing advanced language studies are identified as one of the key reasons for newer candidates not taking up interpretation as a profession.

That apart, the need of skills to ensure that political and diplomatic nuances are not lost in translation makes finding candidates a challenge.

Currently, the PM relies on a very small pool of trusted interpreters on his foreign visits. Even one interpretation going slightly wrong can leave much in its aftermath, as was the case at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in June where the PM’s response to an audience question was in Hindi. His well-trusted interpreter, Nilakshi Saha Sinha, apparently added much more to the PM’s answer in translation.

The anomaly was quickly noted by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, who used it to attack the PM for sticking to what he called “scripted” interactions.

Sinha, in fact, is one of the PM’s most reliable interpreters and speaks Hindi, English, French and Bengali fluently. There are, however, not enough like Sinha to handle the PM’s packed schedule of foreign visits and visitors.

In the past, the PM has had to borrow interpreters from the Lok Sabha Secretariat as well and the results have not been very impressive as was apparently the case when he visited Bhutan in 2015.

A 2016 parliamentary panel report had pointed out that the critical interpreter cadre was “limited to just 33 personnel covering seven languages”. The report noted how the work of the MEA was largely classified in nature and therefore left little room for relying on hired interpreters or translators.

While many Indian Foreign Service Officers with good knowledge of foreign languages, especially in case of Mandarin, have been brought into fill the gap, the parliamentary panel headed by Shashi Tharoor had objected to the move saying it compromised the actual performance of officials as well as the job of interpretation.

In the absence of sufficiently trained interpreters, the PMO hardly has much choice. At the informal summit in China in April, when Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping, it was the first secretary at the Indian embassy in Beijing, R Madhu Sudan, who was asked to be the PM’s interpreter. There have been such instances in case of other nations and languages as well.