At multinational events, professional conference interpreters rely on several working languages. Obviously, interpreters are considered by most people to be bilingual – fluent in two languages. However, many of us are actually multilingual and we work in what we call A, B and C Languages. The majority of professional conference-level interpreters speak two to four…
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At the most basic level, you hire a team of professional interpreters to communicate your message via the target audience’s preferred language. From a macro perspective, there is so much more going on than that. From the way your interpreter team looks and dresses, to their personal conduct and the manner by which they handle a…
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Who doesn’t love the movies? They transport us to another time and place… until you watch a movie about something you really know about, that is. Imagine being a soldier watching a war movie. Yes, certain aspects of battle scenes might be similar to what soldiers experience, but there are also many fallacies embedded in…
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One of the questions we get most often from new clients, or clients requesting simultaneous interpreting services for the first time is, “why do simultaneous interpreters work in teams?” or “will it be OK to have just one interpreter?” The answer is twofold; first, having a team ensures the interpretation is as clean, accurate, and…
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What do Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Swahili, Wolof and Amharic all have in common? They are all languages spoken in Africa, and this list doesn’t even begin to cover all the myriad of smaller subsets of various language and indigenous languages and dialects that pepper this vast continent – There are thousands! Indeed,…
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Your company has a mission statement – and we bet that statement is compelling. At the core of every professional mission statement, however, is a thrumming mantra: We need to be profitable! If you’re not careful, that mantra will overpower the essence of your brand. It will cause you to make seemingly savvy, cost-effective decisions…
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To the outside observer, it can appear that interpretation is a simple process of going from language A to language B via an interpreter versed in both languages, and that any interpreter could take on any job. But there is much more to the story than that. In fact, interpretation is not created equal at…
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Like any industry, translation and interpretation is filled with terminology and lingo that is unfamiliar to the large majority of our clients – or that may have a slightly different meaning than they are used to. While learning these terms is not required, a cursory understanding will be helpful as you meet with various translation…
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The skillset required to be a talented interpreter is much more involved than language fluency alone. It includes characteristics like being well-spoken, a quick thinker, able to remain two steps ahead at all times, multi-tasking, as well as having an intuitive sense of people and their intentions. Without these qualities, an interpreter will have difficulty…
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Most of the time, professional interpreters are hired to perform straightforward interpretation from the source language to the target language, and sometimes back to the source language. This takes place via consecutive or simultaneous interpreting. Occasionally, though, things get a little more complicated. You may be attending an event where some members of the audience…
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