“Muammar Gaddafi’s personal translator broke down towards the end of the Libyan leader’s meandering 94-minute UN speech and had to be rescued by a U.N. Arabic speaker.

The Libyan translator matched the “Brother Leader of the Revolution” word-for-word for 90 minutes before collapsing from exhaustion, just after Mr Gaddafi denounced the popular Ottawa Treaty outlawing landmines. […] The translator broke down as the man once denounced by Ronald Reagan as the “mad man” of the desert embarked on a tirade about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an explanation of his call for a single-state solution called “Isratine”.

According to the New York Post, the Libyan translator shouted: “I just can’t take it any more.”

Rules specify that UN translators provide live interpretation only for 40 minutes at a time, and they are accustomed to seamless handovers. But Libya insisted on using its own translators for both English and French rather than one of the 25 world-class Arabic translators at the UN.

Libyan diplomats said that Mr Gaddafi would be speaking a dialect only his own staff could understand. In the event, he spoke standard Arabic.

Mr Gaddafi spoke six times longer than the 15-minute limit set by the UN General Assembly. But he did not come close to Fidel Castro’s record of four-and-a-half hours, set in 1960.”

The dramatic dénouement is a credit to the high level of professionalism of U.N. interpreters:

“The Libyan translator was bailed out by the UN’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyqeen, who stepped in without missing a beat. Ms Ajalyqeen provided English translation for the remainder of the speech, but sometimes appeared to be chuckling to herself at Mr Gaddafi’s extravagant and rambling language.”

(See the full Report here)