Sad as much as we are of missing the outstanding interpreting event of the century (literally speaking!), “100 Years of Conference Interpreting”, in Geneve (3-4 October)?
We have a palliative solution! Below you can find the links to watch the videos of the entire event. Enjoy!
2. Keynote presentation on conference interpreter practice
Prof. Jesús Baigorri Jalón, University of Salamanca, Spain
3. Pecha Kucha presentations on on conference interpreter practice
Jonathan Downie & Graham Turner, Pedro Luis Queiros Duarte & Hugo Filipe dos Reis Cosme, Maya De Wit & Onno Crasborn, Anne Leahy, Maria Mikhailovskaia & Andrei Kalini, Carlo Eugeni & Rocio Bernabé Caro
4. Panel on conference interpreting practice
Prof. Jesus Baigorri Jalon, University of Salamanca, Spain Matthew Ball, Director, Translation Bureau, Canadian Government Juan Carlos Jiménez Marín, Director, DGLINC, European Parliament Uros Peterc, President, Int’lAssoc.of Conference Interpreters Moderator: Barry Slaughter Olsen, Professor, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
CONFERENCE INTERPRETING RESEARCH
5. Keynote presentation on conference interpreter research
Prof. Alexis Hervais-Adelman, University of Zurich, Switzerland
6. Pecha Kucha presentations on conference interpreting research
Franz Pöchhacker & Monika Stögerer, Rhona Amos, Yanping Dong, Laura Keller, Laura Babcock & Silvia Fanton & Elisabet Tiselius & Fredrik Ullén, Eléonore Arbona, Yinghui Li & Yanping Dong, Xi Yun Yang, Camille Collard & Bart Defrancq, Koen Plevoets & Bart Defrancq
7. Panel on conference interpreting research
Prof. Alexis Hervais-Adelman, University of Zurich, Switzerland Bart Defrancq, Professor, University of Ghent, Belgium Ebru Diriker, Professor, Bogaziçi University, Turkey Franz Pöchhacker, Professor, University of Vienna Moderator: Kilian G. Seeber, Professor, FTI, University of Geneva
DAY 2:
CONFERENCE INTERPRETING TRAINING
1. Keynote presentation
Prof. Jacolyn Harmer, Middlebury Institute of Int’l Studies, USA
2. Pecha Kucha presentations on conference interpreter training
Marie Diur & Lucia Ruiz Rosendo, Helen Campbell, Carmen Maria Delgado Luchner & Nathalie Loiseau, Marcin Feder, Alicja Okoniewska, Conor Martin, Dirk Verbeke, Joshua Goldsmith Michelle Hof.
3. Panel on conference interpreter training
Prof. Jacolyn Harmer, Middlebury Institute of Int’l Studies, USA Javier Hernandez Saseta, Head, Multilingualism and Interpreter Training Support Unit, DGSCIC, European Commission Ian Newton, Senior Lecturer, FTI, University of GenevaClaudio Fantinuoli, Lecturer, University of Mainz Moderator: Monica Varela García, Chief, Interpretation Service, ILO
Christopher Thiery, Honorary President, AIIC Florika Fink-Hooijer, Director General, DGSCIC, European Commission Agnieszka Walter-Drop, Director General, DGLINC, European Parliament Marie Muttilainen, Director, Interpretation, European Courtof Justice Marie Diur, Chief Interpreter, UNOG Moderators: Jonathan Downie, Alexander Drechsel, Alexander Gansmeier (Troublesome Terps)
From left (badass polyglot) to right (bright & professional): Alessandra Vita, Francesca Manicardi, Alice Bertinotti, and Olga Jeczmyk.
BP will probably sound familiar to you already if you are a translator or interpreter. It is a brilliant translation conference, organised on an annual basis by Csaba Bán since 2014: BP14 in Budapest, Hungary; BP15 in Zagreb, Croatia; BP16 in Prague, Czech Republic; BP17 again in Budapest; BP18 in Vienna, Austria. This year it was Bologna’s turn, in Italy, where the main conference was held on May 2nd and 3rd, preceded by several workshops on May 1st. It has been my first BP and surely not my last one.
What does BP stand for?
According to the BP story available on the website, BP stands for ‘business + practice’, even though it has been commonly associated with ‘badass polyglot’ and ‘bright & professional’, but also ‘birthday party’ (since this year the first conference day was Csaba’s birthday).
May 1st
On May 1st, the following four different workshops were offered. Unfortunately I only arrived in the evening for the welcome reception, so I cannot share my impressions.
May 2nd
On May 2nd, speakers were divided in three tracks (always very hard to choose just one session) and gave one-hour-long talks.
My day started with Tess Whitty‘s session on how to find direct clients (here you can read the full thread on Twitter):
Tess Whitty, BP19
1) To find ideal direct clients, try to clone the ones you already have to get similar ones (only if you like the ones you have, otherwise skip the first step!).
2) Find where your ideal clients are and put yourself in their shoes.
3) Help them know EXACTLY what your brand is all about (e.g. use testimonials or surveys).
4) Decide on where to look for clients (e.g. go to industry events).
5) Pick 2-3 marketing methods that work for you (e.g. get published in clients’ journals; contact them on social media; send warm emails; call them; get a website, and also a LinkedIn account).
After listening to her podcast for ages when driving to interpreting assignments, it was great to finally meet her in person.
Alessandra, BP19. Picture credits: Carlos la Orden
Then I apparently didn’t have much choice but to attend my own talk, on practical strategies to try to work less, under better conditions, while making more money (the ideal goal of every freelancer, I guess).
Later I attended Alice Bertinotti‘s session on remote interpreting (here you can read the full thread on Twitter). Alice started talking about the history behind this phenomenon, with its first use in 1973 in Australia.
Alice Bertinotti, BP19
Then we moved to the related terminology: ‘distance interpreting’ can be with a direct view (‘teleconference interpreting’: ‘videoconference’ or ‘audioconference interpreting’) or without it (‘remote interpreting’: ‘video’ or ‘audio remote interpreting’).
After seeing the different possible setups, technical requirements and infrastructure, we saw its challenges (e.g. liability; obstacles to an effective communication; more stress and fatigue for interpreters compared to onsite assignments, even when good conditions are provided; etc.).
After very tasty tortellini for lunch, I found the Excel session by Javier Ortiz, a fellow interpreter, extremely interesting (here you can read the full thread on Twitter). I am an Excel-geek myself and love checking the cost-effectiveness behind each project, but Javier and his partner, Adam, use it at a whole other level!
Javier Ortiz, BP19
They track their working time with the app atWork to know exactly for which activity they’re using it, whether billable or not. With Excel formulas, among many aspects, they can see exactly how cost-effective a project is taking into account both billable and non-billable hours; where their income comes from exactly, and so on. I will surely implement some of what they are doing to gain more insights on my business.
Irene Koukia talked then about how to backup and protect our data in a GDPR-compliant way. For example, she does a daily backup of her files on Dropbox or Google Drive, among others, and then she adds a second layer of GDPR-compliant encryption, for example with Boxcryptor.
Irene Koukia, BP19
The final session of the day I attended was Jo Rourke‘s talk on retainers. She is indeed an amazing and extremely-funny speaker; plus, the topic was very far from usual, so the attention was constantly high (here you can find the full thread on Twitter).
Jo Rourke, BP19
Retainers should only be used in certain situations, with only specific clients (the ones who pass her 4 Rs: Relationship, Reliability, Return on investment, and Reward), and only if it is a win-win situation for both her and the client, with the following benefits:
Only certain kind of work and documents can fit well with a retainer model. Furthermore, you should clarify very well beforehand the expectations, the scope of the work, the availability, etc. In any case, it is recommendable to start with a test period, and to go on with it only if the experience has been positive for both.
May 3rd
The last day was easier because we didn’t have tough choices to make. We were all grouped in a single room, in which all speakers gave 20-minute talks, moderated by the former-translator and funny comedian, Konstantin Kisin.
The day started with Caroline Alberoni on how to impress clients and make them fall in love with you (here you can read the full thread on Twitter). Caroline recommended that we should never leave our clients in the dark. We should inform them of future unavailabilities in advance and set OoO replies, as well as let them know of any issues during a project.
Caroline Alberoni, BP19
We should adapt to their needs and to their way of working, even when it is not ideal for us (e.g. receiving a translation as text in an e-mail, instead of a Word attachment). We should also mirror the tone clients use to speak to us. To stand out, we should go the extra mile: deliver earlier when possible; notify typos in the source; etc. Caroline reminded us that it all comes down to empathy and that a smile can do wonders. If we work like machines, we’ll be replaced by them.
Olga Jeczmyk-Nowak spoke about how to get more clients in a non-spammy way (here you can read the full thread on Twitter). She recommended having a strong online visibility and studying about our clients to offer a customised solution and stand out from our competitors.
Olga Jeczmyk-Nowak, BP19
After Olga, it was the turn of Susanne Präsent-Winkler on how to raise our rates. She underlined that our prices are not equal to our income, since a big part ends up as taxes (according to her, we can also remind clients of this when they complain about our fees). A good tip she gave is listing in our quotes and invoices all the phases related to the job to make us stand out from the competition. Our service will look more comprehensive.
Susanne Präsent-Winkler, BP19
Peter Oehmen spoke about how to deal with difficult customers. Conflicts might be due to differences in perception, scarce or limited resources, unfair treatment, or independent work. There are different strategies to deal with conflicts, a good one being compromising and the ideal one being finding consensus.
Peter Oehmen, BP19
Jaquelina Guardamagna‘s session was on soft skills, which are a mixture of inter- and intra-personal skills, or “people skills” (here you can read the full thread on Twitter).
Jaquelina Guardamagna, BP19
She regards them as key for our business, and they can be used to soft sell, namely “a sales approach that features subtle language and a non-aggressive technique.”
Magda Phili‘s topic was instead self-promotion. According to her, we should find the method that best works for us and that is compatible with our personality. She also underlined that humility, collaboration, and perseverance are the key ingredients to become a top-notch translator.
Magda Phili, BP19
I truly loved Vasiliki Prestidge‘s storytelling session on professionalism, where she shared several fun anecdotes to make her point (here you can read the full thread on Twitter).
Vasiliki Prestidge, BP19
Our work clearly doesn’t end with an invoice. We have to make sure that our clients are satisfied and say thank you once in a while. We should treat all our clients with the same amount of professionalism (we never know who is our “golden package”, in reference to the Fedex ad). We are the most valuable asset of our business; so we should act as one.
Sherif Abuzid shared with us some productivity hacks (here you can read the full thread on Twitter).
Sherif Abuzid, BP19
One is following the deep work principle, a “process of performing ‘professional activities… in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit…’”. In other words, he recommends mono-tasking to get in the flow. We can apply this principle by planning for tomorrow (only 5 minutes needed), focusing on goals rather than only on tasks, and setting tight deadlines for all activities. He underlined that it’s not the quantity of tasks we do that matters but rather if they are important for us and our business.
Francesca Manicardi mentioned the importance of diversification, listing some pros and cons of providing several services instead of only one or two.
Francesca Manicardi, BP19
Timothy Barton‘s talk was about translation in developing countries, whether it is a threat or an opportunity. Since many of us are not familiar with certain markets, it was an interesting topic.
Timothy Barton, BP19
Iwona Piatkowska spoke about effective time management for translators (here you can read the full thread on Twitter). Work chunking is an effective strategy to be productive, and progress tracking has positive psychological effects. As a consequence, we should do 50-60% of the project as soon as possible, set a timer to see how productive we are, and avoid the unnecessary procrastination.
Iwona Piatkowska, BP19
Carlos la Orden Tovar was a great closing speaker, who superbly mixed together many truths with a lot of humour in the same recipe (here you can see the full thread on Twitter). Like in the food industry, Carlos explained that we have different options when it comes to running our business, from untargeted and forgettable services to luxury and high-end solutions. An additional successful option he mentioned is his “classic revisited”, whose features you can find in the picture below.
Carlos la Orden Tovar, BP19
He underlined that it’s not all about the clients, but that it rather depends a lot on us when deciding how to run our business and what service we can offer. In order to deploy our killer strategy, he recommends: studying our ideal clients; engaging with them and finding them; listing our needs; planning buffer time, and considering proper training.
Csaba Bán, BP19 organiser
The conference ended with the words of its amazing organiser, Csaba, who explained the reasons behind choosing Bologna and announced that next year BP20 will be held in Nuremberg, Germany, on April 24th and 25th. I personally find incredible how he could take care of everything all on his own (with the help of his wife, but without a team of 100 people) and treated both attendees and us speakers so well, so thanks so much again for the wonderful experience.
Official group picture of BP19 Bologna
P.S. This post will probably be updated as soon as the official pictures (far more decent than mine) and the announcement of the virtual conference will be made. Stay tuned and see you soon! 🙂
In the past few days we have been busy interpreting at the best multilingual conference ever. With attendees from all over the world and 12 amazing interpreters divided in six booths (English/Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian), this has been the best example of a multilingual conference we have seen so far.
Not even the EU is so multilingual: interpreters of all EU languages might be there ready to do their job, but unfortunately many speakers still decide to speak in English rather than in their mother tongue, leaving the English booth’s microphone off most of the time. In our opinion, this makes their message weaker, less assertive, with potential negative consequences on what they wanted to accomplish with it.
This case, instead, was simply amazing. Each and every person on stage spoke in their mother tongue, even when interacting with people of a different language. The event was taking place in two different auditoriums at the same venue, with more than 2,000 attendees in total.
Some sessions were held by two different hosts talking to each other, one in each auditorium. Most of the times, it was a Spanish-speaking host talking with an English-speaking colleague. This of course was piece of cake for us Spain-based interpreters, all with English and Spanish in our language combination, because each person of every booth could interpret alone this dialogue.
The most complex situation for us interpreters, though, was another session in which a French-speaking person was talking with his German-speaking colleague, again in the other auditorium. The only booth who had both languages covered was ours, the Italian booth, since I could interpret directly from German into Italian, whereas my colleague from French into Italian. We just had to be quicker than normal to keep about the same timing as the original dialogue, but it wasn’t complicated for us.
In the remaining five booths, though, our colleagues had to use what is called relay interpreting, i.e. using a colleague’s interpretation as the source message to be interpreted into their native language. For example, during this French-German session, our Russian colleagues (who had English, Spanish and Russian in their language combination) had to rely on the relay of both the German interpreter and the French one into Spanish, which they then rendered into Russian.
The tricky part is due to the delay. Even if it is called simultaneous interpreting, there is always a slight delay (in general, a couple of seconds) between us and the speaker, so that we have the time to process the information and offer it back in the target language. In this case the delay was double (from French/German to Spanish and then from Spanish to Russian); plus, the speakers were two with short parts each, which meant it all had to be very quick.
Again, the organisation of this event was superb. They provided in advance the scripts of the sessions and scheduled several rehearsals, where we could check whether we had enough time to do it with relay. As they say, practice makes perfect, and everything went great.
So the next time you organise a multilingual event, think about this great example, deliver your message as strongly as possible in your native language, and let us interpreters do the rest!
Being now very often in Brussels, I couldn’t miss the conference held at the European Commission, Translating Europe Forum 2018, on November 8th and 9th (I know, this post comes with some delay, sorry!). Yet, the main reason to attend was that finally a translation conference focuses on my main area of specialization, namely Big Data. I have been translating for ages about how Big Data is disrupting different fields, but never mine.
Attending this conference was definitely worthwhile, as I am sure you would agree after watching the recordings (available below). The panel I liked the most was the first-day plenary panel on neural machine translation (NMT), whose evolution has been astonishing and with which statistical-based machine translation simply cannot keep up. The panel agreed that the quality currently offered by NMT cannot be compared to professional human translation. Yet, more has happened in the last couple of years than in decades.
My personal take is that NMT is definitely here to stay and, provided it’s up to us to choose whether or not to use it to our advantage, we should see it as an ally to boost our productivity and not as the enemy. Of course, dealing with agencies trying to oblige us to become post-editors for peanuts instead of translators for decent fees is another story.
By the way, it is estimated that proofreading requires about 30% of efforts compared to translation, while post-editing would take approx. 65% provided that the quality is decent. This information can be used as a guideline for setting our post-editing fee per word, even if ideally we should always charge per hour afterwards (as Erik Hansoon rightly pointed out in his panel, agencies would generally not accept this method since they need to quote the project before it begins, not when it’s over).
Very interesting discussions have also been focusing on GDPR and related details which I hadn’t considered before, such as complicated questions like ‘To whom does the TM provided by the agency, edited by me and paid by the client belong?’ Curiously, one of the panelist was a lawyer specializing in nothing but copyright of TMs, but I must say that that panel brought up more doubts than clarity regarding GDPR among attendees! 😉
It has also been a great occasion to meet again or for the first time in person many wonderful colleagues, such as Alexander Drechsel, Maria Pia Montoro and María Galán (in the pictures below).
Below you can have a look at the programme of each day and watch all the video recordings.
Day 1
Below follow two of the three parallel sessions and their recordings (unfortunately for newcomers to the language industry, that recording is not available) .
Day 2
Below follow all the recordings of the three parallel sessions.
The icing on the cake was that a professional draughtsman artistically summarised each panel and keynote speech. Here are some of his works of art.
Finally, you can also read the event’s thread on Twitter: #2018TEF. I hope to meet you there next year, probably in November 2019!
Additionally, three IAPTI workshops were offered at Universidad Europea de Valencia on Friday 28th: an English-into-Spanish medical workshop by the number one of the field in Spain, Fernando Navarro; a business-oriented workshop by one of IAPTI’s great organisers, Gary Smith; and, last but not least, a third workshop on how to prepare for a high-profile interpreting assignment by the one and only Tony Rosado.
Fernando Navarro’s workshop on medical translation
Tony Rosado’s workshop on high-profile interpreting assignments
Gary Smith’s workshop on freelance business management
Once the workshops were over, some of us had lunch at a very nice restaurant by the port. Those coming from far away could already have a taste of the Spanish life, also timewise: we started eating at 3 pm and finished by 6 pm our sobremesa (when you’re done eating but remain at the restaurant talking).
Shortly after, a cocktail dinner was waiting for us at Hotel Barceló, with one of the most exclusive views of the City of Arts and Sciences.
Saturday
If you look at Saturday and then Sunday’s IAPTI programme, you might understand why ubiquity would have come in handy at this conference. There were too many interesting talks taking place at the same time, so it was extremely hard to choose just one.
After the great opening by Gary Smith and IAPTI’s president, Aurora Humarán, the first presentation was delivered by the first keynote speaker, Emily Wilson, who re-traslated the Odyssey into English. She dived into this challenging adventure to try to be more loyal to the original and convey the possible different interpretations it offered. Curiously, media coverage mainly focused on the fact that it was a woman who now translated it, even though many female translators had already done the same into different languages before her.
Since ubiquity wasn’t unfortunately included in the lovely IAPTI welcome bag, you can only find here a summary of the talks we attended.
Tony Rosado spoke of court and healthcare interpreter ethics, where we considered, among other aspects, interesting ethical dilemmas regarding confidentiality. For example, can you reveal a piece of information you got in a previous interpreting session if the patient is in a coma and his life depends on it? Tony underlined that your goal as a healthcare interpreter is the patients’ wellbeing, but you should always get their consent first if possible. In a healthcare situation, you need to interpret everything, and warn everyone of it; they can’t tell you, “Don’t say to him that…”. Also, you should try to persuade patients to tell the truth, unlike what happens in court interpreting. In the latter, Tony explained that duty of confidentiality ends by court order; not even a priest is exempt, only the legal team (including the court interpreter) thanks to the client-attorney privilege.
After Tony, many interpreters had the pleasure to attend Sarah Cuminetti’s presentation about her interpreting experience related to books. She explained that most of the times you need to offer consecutive or whispered interpreting in such settings. Ideally, you should read the book in question, but that’s not always possible due to last-minute requests. In that case you need to prioritise and focus on the authors’ biography and main titles published (of which you should know the translation). It’s also key to try to find out their favourite writers and books since this is a common question asked by journalists. Other than these, Sarah clarified it won’t be possible to know all the writers and book titles of the world in two languages, and that there will be surely someone in the room that catches the reference, so don’t make titles up yourself!
After a delicious lunch, technology offered us the very insightful talk of Prof. David Crystal who spoke about language acceptability and change, with a great deal of humour. He explained that there are many English varieties: written and oral English; formal and informal English; in-house (for peer experts) and out-of-house (for general audience) English. Furthermore, translations can be either synchronic (as language is now) or diachronic (with history of language use over time). As translators, we might therefore face the dilemma of whether we should keep on translating concepts or terms as we used to in the past for consistency or rather based on the current needs. Prof. Crystal also underlined that it’s completely normal that language changes (e.g., ‘must’ has been substituted more and more by ‘have to’ in the last decades), and that the only ones that don’t change are dead languages.
Then, back to the interpreters’ room to listen to Beatriz Abril on interpreting for migrants and refugees, followed by Javier Castillo‘s workshop on how to improve our interpreting skills using memory palaces (e.g., picturing elements of a list somewhere in your house in a specific order to remember them more easily).
Kyle Wohlmut‘s presentation fulfilled the extremely high expectations created by his hilarious pre-IAPTI video (warning: please keep out of reach of children, watch it when you are alone, and get ready to laugh for 2:24 minutes). Among many funny aspects related to swearing, he considered different translations of Trump’s “shithole countries” and the book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k”.
Then back to the interpreters’ room again to attend another presentation by Tony Rosado, in which he tackled the very controversial topic of remote interpreting. This reality is here to stay, but we interpreters need to embrace it only under certain conditions: that we are in the same place as our booth mate, that we get paid the same as we would onsite (and not per minute, only when truly interpreting, as we unfortunately start to see). This is possible for example with Kudo, among other solutions.
Saturday ended with a Basque pinchos dinner at another exclusive location.
Sunday
The dilemma of which talk to attend wasn’t any easier on Sunday. Alessandra even considered not attending her own talk to go to someone else’s presentation, but eventually decided it wouldn’t have been very polite to do so! 😉
As always with Xosé Castro, the second day couldn’t have started better. In his very fun and comprehensive talk, Xosé hilariously shamed us a little to invite us to be more productive, offering many useful tricks and tools.
Sergio Viaggio, former UN chief interpreter, talked later about the legal and judicial interpreting settings. He also considered the pros and cons of retour, mentioning that nothing is either black or white, but it depends on the context (as always in our field).
Then Alessandra, manager of Specialized Translators, spoke about running our business with direct clients and explained how to work less, under better conditions, while making more money. The idea behind her talk is summarised on her first slide.
Alessandra also mentioned well-tested and effective strategies on how to get amazing deadlines for translations, receiving plently of documentation many days before an interpreting assignment, how to cover our backs by including clauses in quotes to be signed by the client, and so on. In general, she recommended an economic and business approach to solve common problems we have to face on a daily basis.
Since many attendees asked for the link, below you can also find the video she used to show the toxic patterns that we need to eradicate in our profession and that would never happen in other industries.
Afterwards, Sue Leschen spoke about the different documents we may need for our business: CV (she has a master CV from which she selects only the relevant sections whenever she needs to send a personalised CV to a client), contracts, quotes, estimates, business cards, among others.
Before lunch, Paolo Cappelli offered a different perspective on the issue of interpreting for refugees and migrants, focusing on the historical and economic situation of Africa.
After another very tasty lunch, Stefan Schmidt explained the Aquarius emergency and the role of professional interpreters in similar circumstances.
Another inspiring talk was offered by three Polish translators and interpreters: Katharina Wawrzon-Steward, Justyna Gutoswka, and Ewa Jasinska-Davidson. Apart from being freelancers with their own clients, they explained the history behind their common project, Business Language Boutique.
If you wonder how a terminology talk can be hilarious, ask the amazing Heidi Cazes-Sevilla, who explained how to assess one’s sources and choose the right terms when translating or preparing for an interpreting assignment.
The final presention was delivered by the keynote speaker and charming financial translator, Ralf Lemster, who spoke about new realities of the translation business, such as AI, NMT and PE. Ralf explained that technology is changing the speed of our work, but every curse comes with a blessing. He recommended exploiting the technology available to our benefit, growing our network, improving technical and business-related skills, helping others, and exploring adjacent areas.
The end… for now
These three days were truly amazing and there was no better way to celebrate together the International Translation Day on September 30th.
P.P.S. Foodies definitely have to sign up for IAPTI2019 next year (please don’t watch below if you are already hungry and if the fridge is too far away!).
At Specialized Translators, we are all passionate professional translators and interpreter. We love translating and interpreting, but we also love sharing best practices and tips with students to help them the best we can during their training.
On Monday, September 24th, Alessandra was kindly invited by a fellow interpreter, Diana Soliverdi, to hold a conference on the Spanish private market. The talk was addressed to students attending the postgraduate interpreting course (Spanish + English + French/Italian) at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Institutional vs. private market
Alessandra started by explaining the main differences between the private and the institutional market (mainly focusing on the Spanish booth at EU institutions).
In the institutional market, you normally work only into your mother tongue and it’s great to have as many passive and exotic languages as possible. To become an EU-accredited interpreter you need to sit for a test, to which you are invited provided that you have an interesting language combination. Generally, unless if you have an exotic language combination, you would only get to work for EU institutions if you are based in that specific city (e.g. Brussels for the EU Commision).
In the private market, instead, it’s key that you work in both directions, i.e. into your mother tongue as well as into your B language (what we call retour). At least in the Spanish private market, it’s recommendable to have fewer and more demanded working languages (e.g. even just Spanish < > English), which you truly master actively, than a long list of exotic passive languages that you have a scarce domain of (e.g. Latvian, Polish, Croatian, English > Spanish).
The pros and cons of retour
In a nutshell, the main difference between the institutional and the private market is the use of retour in the latter. Retour was born in the private market for economic reasons (since it implied needing fewer interpreters and fewer booths). Unlike what people commonly think, interpreting literature shows that retour is not the black sheep and does have positive aspects for interpreters working from their mother tongue into a foreign language: it provides a better verbal, body and cultural understanding; it’s easier whenever there are audio-related issues; it offers better mnemonic performances (you retain in simultaneous interpreting 9 words working A > B, and only 5 words when the direction is B > A); finally, since you’ll probably have fewer ways to convey a message in a foreign language compaired to your mother tongue, you waste less time choosing.
And much more!
We also talked about the importance to acquire marketing and business skills to avoid interpreting at home just for ourselves. We went through best practices on how to acquire some experience with common sense, how to find clients, how to have a positive professional relationship with them, to keep on learning and always be humble, to be a good person and booth mate to work with. And, last but not least, we laughed together about some funny anecdotes an interpreter has to deal with.
Thanks again, Diana, and to all the students for the interest and very active participation. Good luck with your training!
In the past few days we have been busy interpreting at the best multilingual conference ever. With attendees from all over the world and 12 amazing interpreters divided in six booths (English/Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian), this has been the best example of a multilingual conference we have seen so far.
All this was possible thanks to the great IAPTI team, featuring president 
