BLOGS
My view on simultaneous interpretation (by Song)
There’s a lot of coverage on conference and simultaneous interpreters in newspapers and on websites nowadays, mostly due to the special features of this profession. For example, they go in and out of nice venues, take many business trips (including quite a few international ones), and they are generously paid and have the opportunity to establish good relationship with conference participants directly. All these have made this profession especially attractive to many of the younger generation. I hereby would like to make a few clarifications via this platform.
1. Simultaneous interpreters are paid by the hour. One common question for us is that “how much dollars do you make for an hour”. Well, my personal experience of a decade would say that professional simultaneous interpreters are rarely paid by hours. Usually, the price quote is on a day or on half a day and are agreed beforehand together with the time of service. In delivery, when a half-day contract only takes one hour or when a four-day contract is completed within one day, the contract still needs to be honored, because the time that we set aside for the meeting is fixed and the preparation remains the same, so charging by hours would be unreasonable in such circumstances. However, on some occasions when we have to work a few extra hours, we do not fuss over extra payment either.
2. Simultaneous interpreters simply enjoy their life because they can easily make in a day what common people make in a month. People often say such things like we do not have to stretch ourselves far too thin or that working a few days in a year or doing a few conferences in a month would be sufficient for us to sustain economically. But in fact, simultaneous interpretation is a technical job which puts tough requirements on your bilingual skills, knowledge structure, etc. Once stop doing it for a while (say for a month, which, of course, depends on each person), some interpreters need time to readapt. If such a break is more than a year, it will take quite a while or becomes very difficult for one to pick it up again. Without practice, one’s speed of reaction as well as sensibility to language will blunt and hence affect the interpretation and its outcome. Therefore, professional simultaneous interpreters need to constantly sharpen the knife to keep their edges.
3. Simultaneous interpreters are the highest level of foreign language talents. Foreign languages usually involve knowledge in various fields, like literature, history, art, science and technology, economy, engineering, to name but a few. Simultaneous interpreters are more likely to become jack of all trades than master of one. It is true that they touch many areas but they are far from being an expert in any one of them.
4. Simultaneous interpretershave a good memory and a large vocabulary. Do the simultaneous interpreters have a larger vocabulary? Well, if glossaries in a field constitute a memory module, we do have a number of such modules in our mind. However, we can not remember them at all time. When we receive an assignment on a particular field, the corresponding module will be activated through some study and preparation, which is usually faster than memorizing from scratch. Yet afterwards this module quickly cools down to freeze as our brain needs to make room for the same process with another module in another field. Thus, for organizers who require us to sign and adhere to a non-disclosure agreement, we sometimes tell them “you worry too much”, because we almost immediately forget about what’s been interpreted after the conference.
