At Least Forty Interpreters

One of the biggest conferences this year, at least as far as the number of interpreters, was held in October. The International Consultation on Christian Persecution gathered at least forty interpreters under its auspices. I think we did a good job.

Interview on TV

Another interview with national team coach Bernd Storck on TV. This time interpreting for DIGI Sport.

How to clean badly formatted Word documents?

This post is going to be a bit off-topic, however, as some interpreter’s also work as translators, it may still be of help. We all know badly formatted Word documents in the language service industry. These can be the result of OCR and PDF conversions or the work of inexperienced users of word processing software leading to excessive tags in CAT tools. I recently came across an add-in which is quite some help in cleaning up such documents. It’s called TransTools; for details, see the link below. It really helps a lot and actually it’s for free (donations are welcome)!

Interpreting Live on TV

Interpreting Hungarian national team coach Bernd Storck live on Hungarian TV. It’s a major advantage if you know the potential names for the Hungarian football team ahead of time because you don’t have to guess while they are being pronounced by the German head coach the way they are…

Announcement of the Hungarian football team for the UEFA Euro 2016

Proford Carnival

Friday, 04/03/16: Upcoming event with an excellent opportunity for networking: Proford Carnival.

Improve Your Memory

An inspiring TEDx speech on how to improve your memory. Useful not just for interpreters.

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.