The other day we had another interpreting event. This one was 7 booths, 7 languages and 14 interpreters. Big interpreting events are full of life, movement, stress, and, peculiarities. In this case, the event went like a charm, but that’s not always the case.
Like in any other big project there are a lot of cogs that need to go together and when one fails, the all system shuts down. As the saying goes: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I can’t think of any saying with the same meaning in Portuguese, can you? Let me know in the comments.
In order to avoid eventual hiccups, I’m going to tell you a few things you may want to take into account whether you are organizing an event, working on it or simply looking for a provider to help you.
1 – Give the interpreter access to documentation.
Do you know those enormous speeches? No speaker goes on stage without preparing his speech (alright, some do, we are allowed to silently curse at them). And preparing his speech means that he/she will have the speech written in Times New Roman 18 right in front of him. If he can have it, so can – and should – the interpreters.
Sometimes speakers have funny accents, sometimes they speak too fast, too far away from the microphone, and sometimes they read things the wrong way. Whether the case may be, try to eliminate variables and press for that speech. Call the assistant, the event organization, anyone (anyone but the speaker himself, if he’s high profile) and try to get hands on that speech and give it to the interpreters.
The speech is a crucial element for an interpreter. It allows the linguist to know exactly what the event is about, prepare some technical words and walk at the same pace as the speaker.
It’s 10 minutes to the event and you still don’t have the speech? Keep pressing, if the speaker is high profile, he probably doesn’t have it either and chances are it’s being printed out at a machine on the backstage.
2 – Carefully review the interpreter’s CV.
Interpreting is hard work. For translation one may say that years of experience is a good thing; and for interpreting too. But be careful, an interpreter who is too old may not be able to work as fast as younger one and the delay may be bigger. If there are relays (I’ll talk about these in a sec) that delay may double and this can be a problem.
So if you’re an agency or someone recruiting interpreters bear in mind that the more experience, the better, but age may diminish an interpreter’s ability to perform certain jobs. Of course this doesn’t apply to all interpreters. I’m sure some older interpreters may maintain their full abilities.
3 – Have the AV team ALWAYS on standby.
If there are many booths, amplifiers, complicated sound systems, microphones, lights, cables, etc. there are going to be problems. Prepare for the worse – prepare for your booths to go mute, for the video to go dark or for the speaker’s microphone to get tired of listening to him.
Test ahead with the AV team and try to have someone besides your booths on standby. This way, if things go south – and they eventually will – you’ll be able to act quickly.
4 – Be there half an hour before the event.
In an effort to minimize the above-mentioned problems, you’ll certainly will test the equipment on the day before. Well, test again on the day of the event.
Ask the interpreters to be on scene 30 to 45 minutes before the beginning to account for delays, test the equipment, give them the speeches (if you don’t have them yet, that would be a good time to start asking), introduce the interpreters to the AV team, equipment, and location.
5 – Be careful with the interpreter’s accent!
For us linguists, accent is not all that important. But for someone who isn’t a linguist, an accent may be the difference between a god and a bad speaker.
So if your interpreter has a different accent from the “standard” one of the language he’s interpreting into, you may end up with complaints, even if he actually did a good job.
Complaints aside, an accent may also be the difference between a listener understanding an important term or failing to comprehend an entire speech.
6 – Make sure everybody knows the equipment.
Especially if you have relays, interpreters will need to push a few buttons on the consoles when they are working. They will need to go from channel A to B to change the output language and choose if they want to listen to the floor or another booth.
There are some widely used equipment that almost all interpreters know how to work with, and some more rare ones that no one has ever heard about – and these are the enemy you want to get to know.
Before an event, it’s important for whoever is organizing it to know exactly which equipment will be on site and, if it is an uncommon one, it may be a good idea to send some documentation to the interpreters for the 30-minute test before the event may not be enough.
7 – Make sure there’s a good partnership going on in the booth.
Imagine being stuck in a small booth with a person you hate for 2 days. Wouldn’t that jeopardize your work? Not to mention that blood stains are hard to clean from the booths’ insolation foam and we want to avoid that.
Interpreters understandably have some colleagues who they work better and some who they don’t like to work with. It is important to maintain a good relationship in the booth for optimal results.
Interpreting is a lot about team work. For example, while one interpreter is working, the other is writing down numbers, terms and googling any difficult contexts.
For better results, when hiring interpreters, let them choose who they will work with. Only they know who their best partners are and they usually appreciate sharing their colleague’s contacts with you. Of course you still need to take a look at their CVs, but in most cases you can take their word for it.
8 – Don’t rush out, there may be more to come.
“It’s 6 o’clock, thank you and see you tomorrow.” NO.
Just because the conference is over, doesn’t mean you’re free to go. Odds are someone will knock on your door and ask for someone to help with a consecutive interpretation for a flash interview or a quick chat.
Feel free to open the booths’ doors and get some fresh air, have a coffee and relax. But stay for extra 15 or 30 minutes. This can make the difference between a good interpreting service and an average one.
Remember: at the end of the day, people will only remember what went wrong.
9 – Make sure the interpreters have water, internet, nearby toilets and coffee, please.
In an effort to eliminate distractions like having booth doors opening and closing when interpreters request for wi-Fi passwords, water, etc. try to have these things ready at the booths. Print a paper with the password and have a few bottles of water in each booth.
Also make sure the place is cool, temperature inside the booths may become a problem.
10 – Be careful with relays.
Relays can be either your best friend or your worst enemy. But what are they?
Relays are basically the ability that the interpreting equipment has of fetching the speech either from the speaker (what we call floor) or another booth. This way, you won’t need to have pure booths (single language booths) and you can cut on costs and space.
So, if you have an event where the speakers will speak Russian, Arabic and English, you can have only two booths [AR-EN-AR] and [RU-EN-RU]. When the speaker is Russian, the RU booth will interpret to English and the AR booth will fetch the sound from that booth to interpret into Arabic. This may become hard to comprehend. I always make a draw for myself.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that there will be a slight delay between the speaker and the 1st booth and an even bigger delay for booth 2 because it will wait for booth 1. When you have many languages, you may be tempted to have relays of relays and I can’t advise you to do so. The delay at the last booth may be significant for the audience of that language.
To add insult to injury, don’t forget that, much like translation, a little bit of information may be lost in each relay. So if you abuse on relays, you may end up with a delayed bad interpretation of the speaker’s speech.
Keep it as simple and close to the source language as possible.