Interpreting from Your Home Office Calculated in Minutes?

Video interpreting it seems is becoming more and more popular. Over a short period of just a few weeks I have received two offers from interpreting agencies. In the case of the new video interpreting systems the interpreter, the speaker (and his audience) or the negotiating parties log-in on a dedicated server, resulting in an exceptionally good sound and picture quality, which is far better than anything you have experienced through Skype and similar services. And all this can be done by the interpreter from his home office over the internet. Read more

Consecutive Interpreting

What should you pay attention to when arranging consecutive interpreting? Let's, for example, take a training held by a foreign trainer with Hungarian participants (for 10-15 individuals without a microphone) assisted by either one or two interpreters. Read more

How to Organise a Conference with Interpreting

Almost every interpreter knows the story how many, many years ago although the interpreting technology was ordered, interpreters were not arranged seeing they thought that the device itself would do the job. Of course, we no longer hear about such things, but there are still numerous traps worthwhile paying attention to when organising interpreting for an event. Read more

Acoustic Barriers

A recent interpreting assignment made me think again of automated interpreting applications which I wrote about in one of my former posts. I was in a restaurant with one of my clients and their guests. The way in which we were seated wasn’t so favourable (around a big round-table), as I, the interpreter wasn’t sitting between the parties, but next to them. The result was that it became more and more difficult to understand what my client and their guest were saying after the background noise of the restaurant and the music was getting louder all the time. (Here is a video that explains what this means, the part about the background noise in bars starts at 5:00). I was about to switch to lip-reading to understand the most important parts of the conversation. The whole situation was a lot more tiresome compared to an average interpreting assignment, but the revelation that no automated interpreting application is likely to cope with this kind of noise pollution in the near future made me feel happy again. It looks like we, the flesh and blood interpreters can still lean back for a while. At least until the next assignment.

What You Should Pay Attention to in the Case of Relay

Austria, March 2015, interactive training with 6 active languages: It was once again useful to experience that in the case of a relay – i.e. using a third, intermediate language during interpretation – it’s always worth calling the attention of speakers/trainers to have a little break after they have heard an interpreted contribution  prior to  starting with their own remarks. Otherwise the interpreters working from the intermediate language will still be engaged with interpreting, while the trainer has already started with their contribution. And this inevitably leads to interpreters not hearing the first few seconds of the trainer’s remarks. I don’t think I have to go into details what dangers that bears.

 

When are Fully Automated Interpreting Applications About to Come?

According to a recent article in the New York Times Google is soon going to update its Google Translate app for Android devices, which will be able to recognise speech and language in the case of the most popular languages offering a written translation for them. It’s obvious that it won’t take too long until the application will automatically “read” the translation. Skype has already accomplished that step in December 2014: In the case of Spanish and English it’s offering an interpretation service in real-time. Although the conversation is still limping along from time to time and grammatical aspects play just a secondary role – as can be seen in the video within the article – communication is moving on. As an interpreter, however, the real question is, when these applications are about to deliver an acceptable quality during negotiations or on conferences. The Interpreter’s Blog will keep an eye on this issue and is also going to get the opinion of experts and colleagues.

Proford Carnival

Friday, 20/02/15: Upcoming event for language service experts with an excellent opportunity for networking: Proford Carnival.

Interpreter’s Blog: What Makes the Difference?

Let’s start with an example: Interesting and/or entertaining content is vital to all kinds of blogs, otherwise nobody wouldread them. The Interpreter’s Blog, however, would like to convey useful information as well: concrete and palpable information to all the players of the language service providing industry, like what you need to do for conference interpreting to be really smooth and professional. At the end of this article you’ll find a checklist for organisers to help your work.

The Interpreter's Blog Starts

After spending quite some time with preparations, it’s time for me to start the Interpreter’s Blog which will be the first professional blog to highlight useful, interesting and entertaining information in connection with interpreting. However, this leads to the first question: Will the Interpreter's Blog really be the blog the industry has been waiting for? There are already a bunch of blogs dealing with that topic… This is true, of course, but whenever I come across a site dealing with interpreting, I almost always have the feeling that there is something missing. These sites are full of reports and accounts in first person singular and barely contain anyuseful content. the Interpreter’s Blog wants to be different in this regard. How this is going to work out, I will highlight that in the next post.