Edward Spears - Linguistic Competence

Linguistic Competence

In October 1939, he led a delegation of British MPs to France and spoke on French Radio. After the broadcast, listeners protested that his speech had been read for him because ‘an Englishman without an accent did not exist’! In February 1940, he gave a lecture on the British war effort to a large and distinguished audience in Paris. Fluent though he was, he nevertheless felt it would be helpful to attend lessons with an elocution teacher who coached leading French actors. It must be supposed that he also spoke some German thanks to the two years which he had spent at a boarding school in Germany.

Despite his linguistic competence, Spears hated translating. He realised that it required qualifications beyond a mere knowledge of two languages. At the conference at Tours on 13 June 1940, he had the awesome responsibility of translating Paul Reynaud's French into English and Winston Churchill's English into French. The final phase of the Battle of France and the destiny of two nations were at stake; it promised to be the gravest of the meetings so far held between the two governments. Furthermore, he was aware that others in the room were completely conversant with both languages and that most of them would have thought of the word that he was searching for before he had found it.