Interpreter Preparation

Perhaps the work we do as interpreters to prepare for an assignment may seem over the top or unnecessary to a client, however it is essential to providing an excellent level of interpreting. Lara (one of the co-authors of this blog) also wrote an article about preparation exactly one year ago, and it still rings true today.

I was recently referred to a LinkedIn post written by Jonathan Downie after I had an interesting conversation with Julia Poger about the preparation work I had undertaken for an assignment. This post quite literally hit the nail on the head for me and so I wanted to share it.

Jonathan wrote the following post which highlights the preparation you can expect an interpreter to do:

“How is your interpreter preparing for your next event?

We are:

Watching videos of your speakers to learn their verbal and vocal habits and the way they make a point

Closely examining the event website for clues as to what your goals are (if you haven't already told us)

Consulting online termbanks and assessing their usefulness and accuracy

Watching videos of previous years of the event (if available) to see how you do business

Practising interpreting to the kinds of speeches we will come across

Extracting terminology from reports, white papers, briefings, and anything your company might have made public

Discussing specific issues (adhering to the strictest of standards of confidentiality) with trusted colleagues to get their expert advice

Creating our own assignment- and client-specific terminology and phrase lists

Practising interpreting even more

Practising some more

Adding new information from the materials and notes you send

Practising some more

It's little wonder that a typical, straightforward, conference interpreting assignment creates a day of preparation for each day of work onsite. All that work so that your event achieves the results that you were after.

You might be surprised at what your interpreters are doing right now, for you.”

All of this preparation work is also a key part of why we need to ensure we are upholding fair market prices and as Julia suggested we can also look at using time-keeping software in order to track how long this actually takes us. After a little bit of searching around I’ll be trying Top Tracker for my next assignment preparation as I like the fact that this has easy to control privacy settings, and seems to be well-adapted to working as a freelancer rather than for a company, but there are many other apps out there.

I find that Jonathan’s list above is pretty exhaustive and similar to my own preparation process. One of the tools I really like to use is Interpreter’s Help alongside Boothmate to then use my glossary in the booth on the job. I love the features of these two tools, they are very straight-forward to use, and I have to say that the developers were very reactive to helping out when I had problems after the most recent MacOS update! If you decide to try out this tool then be sure to use it first in your practice sessions mentioned above – not on the job (which I’m sure goes without saying anyway!)

However, just preparing a glossary is not enough – you also need to know it by heart– which of course takes time as well. I’m well aware of that fact that we don’t always get 5 days to prepare with the luxury of all the documents provided to us but we can try to explain to clients why we need this preparation in order to give them the best service. To learn your glossary a great tool was recommended to me by Lucile Rozé, a colleague and dear friend also based in Paris. This is a website called Quizlet, and this online quiz software is brilliant for glossary-learning. You can upload your glossary (and there are privacy settings to ensure no-one else can view it) and then you have lots of different ways to quiz yourself to have those terms truly under your belt for the assignment.

What thoughts do you have on the time taken to prepare – do you include this in your invoice to demonstrate the value of your preparation work as part of the assignment costs?

Special thanks to Jonathan Downie (whose book you can find here) for allowing us to share his post, to Julia Poger for inspiring this blog article and Lucile Rozé for her recommendation of the site Quizlet.