During grad school, when I was living in Toronto and constantly traveling back and forth between the US and Canada, I got used to this question as the customs agent saw the student visa in my passport: What are you studying? It took me a while to come up with a short answer, because when I said, “conference interpreting”, I was just met with more questions about what conference interpreting actually is, as if I’d made it up.
I tried my best to give a succinct, scripted 15-second response that explained exactly what conference interpreters do, where they work, the rigor of the training, and that no, your niece who spent the summer in Mexico isn’t ready to be an interpreter. In the end, it was all in vain and I resigned myself to a simpler explanation: You know that movie The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman? Yeah. It’s like that.
It’s not surprising that customs agents, or any non-interpreter really, doesn’t know what conference interpreting is. But what has surprised me is how many professional interpreters not working in conference settings don’t know what conference interpreting is. Even more surprising is the interpreters working in conferences who don’t know that there is indeed special training for the very same work they’re doing.
To be fair, I’m in the Midwest of the US, where conference interpreting as I was trained isn’t really a thing. We don’t have international institutions here, and any competent interpreter who works with English and Spanish doesn’t have any trouble getting work without a graduate degree in conference interpreting. So how is it then, that I decided to go to grad school for something that generally is done by any court certified interpreter whose price is right? Why would I bother with this graduate degree? What did I even learn? Well, it’s just like me to want to dedicate two years of my life and lots of financial and psychological resources to some obscure degree that can only be explained with an early-aughts Nicole Kidman movie. But there’s more to it than that. I did learn a few things.
How to be a good team: Good turn-taking, passing over the mic in a way that doesn’t stun, deafen, or confuse your listeners, not choking your booth mate with your perfume and/or lotion, sharing resources, writing down numbers and names, looking up acronyms and keywords when you’re the “off” interpreter, and arriving early. Does it really take special training to know to do these things? Maybe, yes.
The listener’s experience: Because I spent half of my time in grad school listening to my classmates interpret, and the other half being critiqued on my interpreting, I am extremely sensitive to the experience of those listening to me. And I’m not even talking about the accuracy of the interpreting. It’s the delivery. I have worked with interpreters who laugh, cough, rustle papers, ask me questions, make comments about the speaker, all on an open mic. My finger can’t reach the cough button fast enough.
In fact, I’d say that thinking about the listener’s experience was one of the cornerstones of my training. It makes sense when you think about it.
Learning to prepare by not being prepared: During my training, I felt somewhat tortured interpreting for multiple events every week (some mock, and some live) with little to no prep materials given to me in advance. That was exactly part of the training. We were taught how to work with as little as speakers’ names, or the name of an event, and gather a ton of information quickly that would help us prepare. Because we worked at live events, I also learned how to scout out materials at the event itself when none had been provided ahead of time. That detailed program for attendees at the registration table? Yep, I’ll take two: One for me, and one for my booth mate.
What good is the text of a speech when someone hands it to you right before the speech starts? First things first: You’re not going to do a super fast sight translation of it. One exercise that seemed particularly horrible at the time was being handed the text of a speech, marking it up, and then going into the booth 15 minutes later to listen to and interpret the same speech. Then we’d get another text and have ten minutes before we interpreted it, and finally we’d be left with just five minutes to prepare the text before interpreting it simultaneously.
On one of my first assignments as a conference interpreter, on the first day of the event, someone walked up to the booth five minutes before the opening session and handed us the text of the speech that was about to be given. And I knew exactly what to do with it.
Terminology is just a part of a larger picture: If your “interpretation” is just a spreadsheet of words strung together without any actual thought or analysis of what’s being said, it’s not meaningful. You can very easily have all the correct terminology, yet say the exact opposite of what the speaker meant. The goal is not to be constantly speaking, but to say things that actually make sense. Remember that thing about the listener’s experience?
Crisis management: We were prepared not only for not getting materials in advance, but also for last-minute scheduling and venue changes, how to cope when the speaker begins speaking in a language you weren’t expecting, what to do when the speaker begins speaking in a language you don’t understand, what to say when the person asking a question in the Q&A doesn’t speak into a mic, coping with lightening-fast speakers, obscure quotes and references, jokes, and arriving prepared with food and water in case you don’t actually get the breaks you were expecting.
Having said all that, why on earth would I put myself through all that, knowing I could likely do this work without the training? I suppose it’s because I could. Because I knew I wanted to continue working in interpreting, it would give me a solid foundation to build skills, and because I knew the training would set me apart. And hey, doing something that seemed impossible, like quitting my job and temporarily relocating to Toronto? It was irresistible.
I’d love to hear from you. What did you learn in your training that you couldn’t live without?
Want to read about my experience as a conference interpreter trainee? Check out Back to the Booth.
I have been following you for a while, but didn’t realize that you were in the Midwest. I am too! What you said about conference interpreting not being a thing here is spot on. I thought it was just in my language pair, but I think it is the part of the country.
Yeah, I’ve discovered that in the Midwest, there is just as much misunderstanding over what conference interpreters do as there is with what healthcare and court interpreters do. Thanks for reading and commenting! It looks like you’re working with Japanese in Ohio? We’re practically neighbors!
Engish Japanese training is offered at CITS Hawaii, where I teach at the summer program.
One of the many things that I truly appreciated about my time at the University of Maryland’s Graduate Studies in Interpreting and Translation (GSIT) program was connecting with fellow students and colleagues. Now, GSIT instructors and administrators did connect us with their colleagues, international institutions, government agencies, etc., but the mere fact of being in the program motivated me to reach out and connect with students in other graduate programs such as Glendon in Toronto.
From being put in touch by a Glendon instructor with a student in that program, I learned of the NAJIT Scholars program, earned the scholarship, and now am a practicing court interpreter. By way of a fellow GSIT student, I landed a four-week assignment interpreting insurance enrollments in a local grocery store chain at the end of last year. It was by word-of-mouth from a colleague that I learned about coLAB in Toronto and ended up going.
As for instructors, one’s encouragement led me to take the Federal Court Interpreter Certification Exam and attend the University of Arizona’s Court Interpreter Training Institute, another two pushed me to join the leadership of the American Translators Association’s Government Division, and yet another led me to the invaluable professional network found in the Interagency Language Roundtable. In addition, access to the silent booth at the International Monetay Fund or Mexican Foreign Ministry would have never happened had it not been for our incredible instructors.
In the end, I very much value my training but graduate programs provide more than just training. The professional network that I have today would not be what it is had it not been for my graduate studies in conference interpreting. And for that, I am grateful.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Garrett! I couldn’t agree more. There is more to grad school than the training itself; indeed, what good is the training if you’ve got no opportunities to apply it? I’ve also had some great opportunities for interesting work, like the Toronto International Film Festival, presenting at conferences, and sharing my writing in professional associations’ publications that were only possible because of the connections I made during my MCI. Not to mention the graduate education itself, which taught me a new way of approaching my learning, and an appreciation for what rigorous training did for me as a person and as an interpreter…Maybe that is a new blog post!