Linguist No. 9: Silvia Broome (played by Nicole Kidman) in the film The Interpreter (dir. Sydney Pollack, 2005)
As in the case of Linguist No. 6, I’m expanding my definition of a linguist here to include translators and interpreters. Silvia Broome is one of the latter, a UN interpreter who spends most of her working time in a booth, doing French-to-English simultaneous interpretation.
Silvia grew up in a fictional African country called Matobo, which appears to be based on Zimbabwe or South Africa: her parents are British and white African. (Support for the “Zimbabwe theory” is furnished by the fact that the name of the country comes from Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe.) Her Matoban experience means that she also speaks a fictional local language, called Ku. She studied music in Johannesburg and linguistics at the Sorbonne. She plays the flute and has African masks hanging on the wall of her apartment.
The plot of the film concerns nasty doings in her made-up homeland, centering around a dictator named Zuwanie. One day, she overhears a conversation in Ku which seems to indicate an assassination plot is afoot, and the action evolves from there. Nicole Kidman applies her considerable talents to try to make Silvia interesting, but I still found my mind wandering. We don’t actually learn a lot about Silvia, with the result that she comes across as rather insubstantial.
Still, The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first fictional movie to be filmed inside UN headquarters, specifically the General Assembly and Security Council. That’s not nothing, if you’re into that kind of thing. A lot of work went into creating Ku, the fake language. Which is kind of a shame, because I heard a lot more French in this movie than I did Ku. You can read about the creation of Ku here.
Is there anything we can learn from this not very interesting film? Probably only one thing: don’t assume that nobody in your immediate vicinity speaks your language, even if your language isn’t widely spoken.