There are few professions that offer a front-row seat to history, or a chance to rub shoulders with world leaders, as well as the odd tyrant. Interpreting is one of them, and it is interpreters who have given us some of the 20th century's best phrases. The Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, who died in May, aged 81, famously rendered Nikita Khrushchev's threat to the west, made during his first visit to the US in 1959, as "We will bury you". (What Khrushchev actually said was, "Communism will outlast capitalism," but it was the more brutal, and not entirely accurate, phrase that stuck.)
Typically interpreters spend their days "in the booth". This means sitting in a soundproof cubicle, wearing a headset, listening to their own voice, one ear covered and the other ear slightly covered. They work in same-language pairs. Each does a stint of 30 minutes because "after an hour your brain explodes," one says. That simultaneous interpreting should be possible seems something of a human miracle. "I still don't know how I can listen and speak at the same time. There is something happening in my brain I can't understand," I was told.
Like acting, the best interpreters capture the personality of the person who is speaking: the emotion of Ahmadinejad, or the sardonic deadpan of Putin. (This doesn't signify approval, merely a fidelity of rendition.) Interpreters strive for the idiomatic rather than the literal; as one puts it, "You have your favourite synonyms and idioms, like pocket change."
Sitting in on top-level meetings and negotiations, interpreters strive to be invisible. Sometimes clients come up with specific demands. One interpreter who agreed to translate for the fashion designer Ralph Lauren was given a long list of instructions, including what clothes she should wear (black) and how to tie her hair and do her makeup. She turned the job down.

Here's how three translators recall their toughest assignments.

Elena Kidd

Elena Kidd worked as an interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev in the early 1990s, once he was out of office and after the Soviet Union had collapsed. She also interpreted for the oligarch and oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, later jailed by Vladimir Putin in 2002 and released in December 2013. She now works as course director of the MA interpreting and translating programme at Bath University.

It was the 1990s. Yeltsin came to power. Gorbachev was given a huge building by Yeltsin [for his foundation] in Moscow. He moved into the building where I was working, the International Institute for Social Studies. There were 100 interpreters there. We were told: "If you'd like a job, you can apply." Four of us were successful.

Gorbachev was very friendly. I saw him on a daily basis and he was open and nice. I knew Raisa as well: on one occasion I went to say goodbye to them both when they were flying to America. His American friends had sent a jet for him. They allowed us to go on board and it was amazing. It was called something like Capitalist 2. Gorbachev did great things for Russia. Several famous people came to visit him, including Vanessa Redgrave. One day we had a bloke who wanted to publish the Encyclopedia Britannica in Russia. He and Gorbachev had a row over who invented the electric lightbulb. In Russia it was Popov. The bloke insisted it was Franklin.
Translating Gorbachev was easy. I didn't find his Russian [he has a southern accent] hard to understand. The major problem was his sentences: they were very long and convoluted. You had to paraphrase. At the time there wasn't much of a culture of public speaking in Russia. You had generals who would talk for 30 minutes. They could be boring. They didn't use enough jokes or rhetoric.
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I also worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 1995 and 1996. What struck me most about him was he was so organised. If he said we would begin at 3.05, he was there at 3.05. He was in control of everything. He was constantly working. He had to have the best people as his employees, from Harvard, Oxford.

Consecutive interpreters have to analyse every single word. With Russian, the syntax is entirely different from English. You have to listen to the end of the sentence to understand it, and then you start paraphrasing. You bring a lot of your personality to the job. We have to do a lot of research. You never know what you are going to get. One day you do international finance, the next international law. You have to dig deep with every subject.

My students have to analyse; before they speak they have to think. We ask them to become the "owners" of the speech. They listen to the source and then make it their own in English. They use their own idioms, vocabulary. You have to be understood by the audience. You don't want people to be yawning.

Victor Gao

Victor Gao was with the Chinese Foreign Service in Beijing and the United Nations Secretariat in New York from 1983-89; he was an English interpreter for the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. He now works for a private equity company in Beijing and is a commentator on international affairs.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese universities were shut down for a decade, from 1966. I was from the class of 77, the first year of college after the Revolution. The decision [to reopen universities] was made directly by Deng Xiaoping when he re-emerged as the paramount leader of China. It was a legendary class. You had students who had been waiting to go to college for between one and 10 years. I majored in English language and literature. After I graduated from Peking University of Foreign Studies, I was trained as a UN simultaneous interpreter. I was one of the youngest employees of the foreign ministry at the age of 21.
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In the 1980s, Deng was at the top of the [Communist party] hierarchy. Before you worked for him, you had to work on many occasions for other leaders. I was able to work with all the important cabinet ministers in China, the president and the secretary general.

Deng was very diminutive. I'm 170cm, I'm not tall. He came up to my nose. He was about 80 years old, 58 years older than me, and about 152cm tall. Normally I would lower myself a little bit to be at the same level if we walked together. I would sit in a chair behind his sofa.

He was a man of few words. Every word he did use was like a bullet, very forceful. He didn't beat about the bush. He would usually use very colloquial terms; people could easily understand him. He would use his native Sichuan dialect, very folksy, very down to earth, not sophisticated. He expressed himself very clearly by using metaphors and phrases. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white. What matters is that it catches mice." That's typical of the way he expressed himself.
A normal day would see Deng start his meetings with foreigners at 10am. We would arrive at 9am. We would use the Fujian room of the Great Hall of the People. He would pop up at 9.15-9.20. I was very privileged to be at the scene of these high-level diplomatic meetings. In the 1980s, Deng was the most important person in the world. He was unique. People thought he had wisdom, in dragging China out of a hard box and on the way to reform. He talked about how government officials should be made to retire. The Chinese military should be downsized by one million soldiers and officers. He said the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s was a disaster. I was just sitting behind him or walking with him. The momentousness of the occasion was there, and the protocol, with all the bells and whistles.

In 1985 I went with Deng to the UK and met Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street. I also went to an official lunch hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, though I didn't get to eat the lunch. I was given a stool; I was sitting behind one of the Chinese leaders.

Thatcher was in the prime of her political career in 1985. The two governments were having deep discussions about the handover of power in Hong Kong. These discussions were always very difficult and dramatic. Thatcher was considered by the Chinese side as a very capable leader. She was much liked by the Chinese leadership, as a person of principle and as someone you could work with. She was very elegant, affable and dignified. Her English was perfect.

I met Ronald Reagan several times while working with the Chinese president Li Xiannian. In 1987, Reagan underwent an operation for prostate cancer. It was the first time a Chinese president had visited the US. The atmosphere was very uncertain. The US side said there was no guarantee he could meet the Chinese president.
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I knew Reagan had been a great actor. When we finally met him in the White House, he was even better than a Hollywood actor. He was very handsome and elegant. He greeted the Chinese delegation with great grace. Our first meeting lasted 45 minutes. He had to read from talking points typed up on memo cards, one by one. George Shultz [secretary of state] was there. Caspar Weinberger [secretary of defence] was there. Whenever there was a point to be discussed, he would defer to them. He wasn't into substance very much. When we visited the US in 1987, he hosted us again. He had to rely very heavily on prepared talking points. He couldn't deviate from them.

In 1985 Richard Nixon visited China for five days. He came with only two people. There was Nixon, his bodyguard and his PA. I ended up spending a lot of time with Nixon. He was very rare among US politicians. He brought a high level of intellectual discipline and a curiosity about history.

Deng Xiaoping had a vision for China. His prophecy was that world war wasn't going to break out any time soon, and that's why we needed to focus on peace. It's got great relevance today. He brought China out of the darkness.

Banafsheh Keynoush

Banafsheh Keynoush grew up in London in the 1970s, when her father worked at the Iranian embassy. She lived in Tehran after the revolution and trained herself as a simultaneous interpreter by listening to the BBC. She has interpreted for four Iranian presidents, most recently for the country's moderate leader Hassan Rouhani, who visited New York last September.

I went to St Mary Abbots primary school in Kensington, west London [where David Cameron sends his daughter, Nancy]. Both my grandfathers worked for the Iranian foreign ministry, as did my uncles and my brother. This was in the early 1970s, prior to the revolution. When I returned to Tehran I spoke fluent English. I was interested in politics from the age of eight – foreign rather than Iranian politics. I lived in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war; we were frequently witnessing air raids; there were times we were listening to attacks 15 times a day.

Aged 14, I was sitting in my bedroom wondering how I could make my dream happen. I was watching the UN security council discussing a ceasefire to the war and realised that the diplomats were wearing earphones. My father explained that they were listening to simultaneous translation. I thought: "Ha! That's how I can get my foot into the realm of diplomacy." There were no interpreting schools in Iran, so every evening I listened to BBC radio around 8pm and translated it [the broadcast] simultaneously. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to study international relations. There was only one programme in Iran in the early 1990s, but it was open only to men. It was so disappointing. I got my BA and MA in English.
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My career took off very fast after that. I was well-known in Iran. I worked as a university professor and simultaneous interpreter. I interpreted for Rafsanjani [Iran's president from 1989-97]. I worked as a freelancer; I probably would not have passed the checks to get a formal position. Rafsanjani is regal by disposition. He's a pragmatic deal-maker.

After eight years I realised my passion for international studies hadn't subsided, and I applied for the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston. When Khatami, the new president, came to New York for the first time, I translated for him. Khatami is personable and has a sense of humour. He is a thinker. He is at ease in small groups, but less at ease with politics.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited New York every year and I handled his translations for eight or nine consecutive years. I decided to stop the job in 2010. But when Hassan Rouhani came to New York in September last year, I received another call. I was amazed by the excitement about Rouhani's trip, among Americans and especially the Iranians. Family and friends in Tehran were trying to tell me: "This is important." I have worked for four presidents and I know that miracles don't happen.

I found Rouhani to be quite an even-headed man, less prone to excitement than anyone around him. You learn to recognise people who have been through theological studies. They tend to be cool people.

Iranian presidents have different styles. Rafsanjani spoke in more informal terms, in a very relaxed manner. He was almost too relaxed. Ahmadinejad spoke in soundbites. After a couple of years I could predict what he was going to say. You could almost close your eyes without paying attention. With Rouhani it's a little bit harder, as he speaks some English. He pays more attention to what the translator is saying.

The second time I interpreted for him, he was at a meeting with the UN secretary general [Ban Ki-moon]. I was having hearing problems for the first time in my life that day. The secretary general was speaking in a very low voice. It was a crowded room, and I was translating consecutively. Finally Rouhani gracefully said: "I will listen to what he [Ban] says myself." I just translated Rouhani's answers from Farsi to English.
My job as an interpreter is to be invisible. The audience should feel they are hearing the speaker on their own, rather than through an intermediary. You see history unfolding before your eyes. But you also realise every day how much is lost in translation because of cultural differences and nuances, different modes of speech. There is a huge gap between Farsi and English. I'm a very emotional person, and an animated person. I have to be able to communicate and convey feeling as well. Ahmadinejad tended to talk emotionally and I conveyed that. Afterwards people said: "It seems like you are putting yourself in his shoes. He isn't a likable man."

It's hard to find an Iranian who is anything other than optimistic at the moment. But I've seen Iranian politics over several decades. I went into this knowing that the contours of Iranian policy don't change from one president to another. If you ask me, there are a lot of similarities between Iranian nuclear policy now, and before Rouhani came to power.