When Joseph P. Mazza graduated from George Washington University in international politics in 1984, he had no intention of becoming a translator. He did, however, love languages — in college he had studied Russian, Chinese, French and Spanish — so he accepted a job offer as a clerk translator at the Navy, translating from Russian. In 1989, he jumped to the State Department as a translator of Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese). In 2003, he became head of that section and, in 2006, became chief of the translating division, overseeing 20 staff translators, eight translation project managers and about 450 contractors. On a recent trip to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he agreed to meet with the press for the first time and talked with Moscow Times columnist Michele A. Berdy about the genre of diplomatic translation, how 18th-century language is meeting the new communication technology, and how to handle VIP clients who want the translation yesterday.