It's very important. We all know that something is always lost in interpretation from one language to another.
My real experience from day one has been, “Oh, I didn't say that. Your interpreter got it wrong”, or vice versa. The dialect differences are significant enough to cause some grief.
There have been many times, especially in the second and third assemblies, where the quality of the interpretation was sufficient to cause a point of order. Now, let me explain a point of order—which I know you're all familiar with—but for our points of order, you can do a point of order the day after. One of the reasons you can do a point of order the day after, or even two days after, is that we have to go back to see what, in fact, was said in the translation.
I remember one case in the third assembly when a retired member had said something, and some member said, “Oh, I think I have a point of order”. I had three interpreters in my office going through the audio/video. What did he actually say? Three of them were all looking and saying, “He said, no, no”. At the end of the day we finally got it resolved, but that's what I mean by quality. You can get the highest quality interpreters around, but if your dialect doesn't agree with the dialect of the member who is speaking, that's what we ran into.
We always look for high quality, no matter what.
Thank you.