Pivot interpreters are professionals who interpret via an intermediate language due to the absence of direct interpreters between rare language pairs. Pivot interpreting has a wide variety of use cases, including refugee settlement, disaster response, and international relations. Pivot interpreting often saves lives in time-sensitive situations in which direct interpretation between two languages is not possible or effective. For example, pivot interpreting helped Doctors Without Borders respond to a cholera outbreak in South Sudan in 2023; additionally, the International Organization for Migration relied on pivot interpreting to address the migrant crisis in Libyan detention centers between 2019 and 2021.
Pivot interpreting has been practiced for centuries, dating back to Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in the 16th century when communication flowed from Spanish to Yucatec Maya, and then to Nahuatl with the help of two interpreters. However, the term did not become mainstream until the early 2000s with advancements in computational linguistics and machine translation (MT) research. The term has since been defined by United Nations interpreting protocols and non-governmental organization (NGO) field manuals.
Most of the time, English is used as the de facto pivot language followed by another common language — such as Spanish — due to the rich bilingual corpora, resource availability, and cost effectiveness it holds. However, as noted by Kinki University School of Science and Engineering’s 2009 research results on pivot language selection, English proved to be an effective pivot for only 45.5% of 110 languages, while it was outperformed by Asian languages as the stand-in pivot. This proves that, while English may fit the bill the majority of the time, it’s always important to assess each situation to determine the best pivot language.
While pivot interpreters generally hold the same qualifying credentials as regular simultaneous or consecutive interpreters, the industry currently lacks the ability to explicitly train or assess pivot-interpreting skills such as multi-hop relay accuracy, semantic drift management, or cognitive load balancing. These unique professionals work with a set of specialized skills that are largely acquired through hands-on assignments, as they are currently not certifiable.
Franz Pöchhacker notes in his book Introducing Interpreting Studies that most official reports lump pivot interpreting under general “multilingual interpretation” or “relay interpreting,” and that the role is largely undocumented in service logs. This is particularly noticeable in humanitarian, emergency, or immigration settings where only the starting and ending languages — not the pivot language — are mentioned. Increased awareness of this important interpreting role could lead to more recognition and better record-keeping in the years to come.
