Your correspondent Jane Straker writes (Letters, 12 April) that “interpreters should have no vested interest in the outcome of a meeting”, but in fact, in high-level meetings, each side usually has its own interpreter. My father, Isa Khalil Sabbagh, was a US diplomat and the interpreter (though he hated the word) for President Nixon on Middle East shuttles during the 1970s. When it came to a meeting between Nixon and King Feisal of Saudi Arabia, when Feisal discovered that my father was to be the US interpreter he waved away his own, saying: “We trust Abu Khalil (the familiar name for my father) to translate fairly for both of us.”
Karl Sabbagh
Bloxham, Oxfordshire
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