21 Interpreters, 5 Languages, 5 Days: Reflections on Being an Interpretation Coordinator
In October 2020, as a student taking the Practicum in Interpretation course at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey, I served as a coordinator of a multi-lingual interpreting team to support the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association of Chinese Political Studies (ACPS) together with my colleague Josephine Foster. We later shared our experience and takeaways in an interview with the Institute’s WeChat official account (published in Chinese).
Below is a translation of the interview in English.
Q1 - What are the responsibilities of ACPS liaisons?
Our role, simply put, is to make sure the right people receive the right information and get to the right (virtual) booth at the right time. For a conference with 21 interpreters from four different language cohorts servicing 13 sessions over 5 days, this is not that easy. As liaisons, we try our best to take all of the “admin work” off the shoulders of our interpreters so that they can focus on interpreting.
To be more specific, it was our responsibility to create and manage the interpreters’ roster, brief interpreters on all technical and logistic aspects of the program, gather preparation material for each conference session, and resolve any technical glitches that may occur (and they did occur). Having designated liaisons for an interpreting crew of this size is a standard practice in the conference interpretation market because this would also establish an easier, clearer line of communication with whoever hires the interpreters. Overall, what we did on this project was a very real simulation of an actual assignment.
Q2 - What challenges did you face before and during the event? How did you overcome them?
There is a three-hour time difference between the East Coast, where the conference organizers are based, and Monterey CA, where most of our classmates are located. This made scheduling tricky. Luckily, a few of us in the Chinese program happen to be located in the US Eastern time zone, and several California-based classmates also generously volunteered to get up at 6 AM to interpret some of the early morning sessions.
Then there’s the fact that we had to interpret remotely via Zoom. Hiccups are basically inevitable with remote simultaneous interpretation, and oftentimes things aren’t really within our control. It takes lots of patience and teamwork to resolve these issues when they arise. For instance, poor audio quality always creates challenges for interpreters, and we knew this from the get-go. We requested ACPS conference speakers and panelists to use external headsets (as opposed to the internal microphone of their laptops), but convincing them to do so proved to be surprisingly difficult. At least half of the speakers still used the internal microphones. A few of the professors presenting at this conference said they had been teaching on Zoom all day since March, and apparently it had never occurred to them that a USB headset would be necessary. In retrospect, this is one area where we probably could have done a better job nudging conference presenters to comply. If we had more time and budget, we could have also bought and mailed a USB headset to each speaker prior to the conference.
The broader lesson here is that clients generally don’t understand how simultaneous interpretation works, and it takes quite some effort to “educate” them about how to best work with interpreters. Many colleagues in the freelance market can surely relate to this.
Q3 - Why did you want to take up this role? What have you gained from this experience?
Our involvement in the conference was part of Practicum in Interpretation (TIAG 8604), a mandatory second-year course of the MACI program. The idea is to give students a taste of “real-life” interpretation assignments. Of the different projects under the framework of this course, the ACPS conference is a rare opportunity to actually work with an external party—the week-long conference was organized by faculty and staff members from the Middlebury College in Vermont. In other words, we saw it as a more “real” project and arguably a more meaningful one. Both of us have had experience working as freelance interpreters, but the opportunity to lead a team of 20+ interpreters is rare.
Plus, when we saw the lineup of speakers at the ACPS conference, which included the renowned China scholar Ezra Vogel (傅高义), we were very excited about getting involved just so we can hear such a mastermind share his wisdom. It was an honor and pleasure to be part of something like this, although our work was mostly behind the scenes.
Q4 - Any other thoughts or advice you want to share?
Needless to say, it was a busy week. To express our appreciation and give our team members a chance to enjoy themselves, we organized a virtual Happy Hour on Friday night. If this were an off-line project, we’d treat them with pizza and drinks. For a dispersed virtual team like this, a Zoom celebration was the best (and least) we could do.
This year, fully remote classes made students’ social life very different. We thought our team members would appreciate an opportunity to get together outside of the classroom, and they did. They took advantage of this happy hour to chat about anything and everything and even played board games, wrapping up the ACPS experience with laughter and solidarity.
Read the original interview in Chinese: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fjSauTUDPC8RINUVT5YYNg
Rony Gao is a prize-winning conference interpreter, certified translator and communications consultant based in Toronto and serving clients worldwide. He regularly provides consecutive and simultaneous interpretation services for the Government of Canada, international organizations and global leaders in business, technology and academia.
