Anyone who understands and speaks more than one language has probably experienced the situation where two people cannot communicate because they do not speak the same language. As a "hobby interpreter" you can help here and feel good afterwards - you have made your own contribution to a more harmonious world, and perhaps the two parties have come to the desired result. This feeling can actually still be described as "modest" when one considers the scope of some interpreting services. Famous among interpreters is the statement of the Norwegian politician Trygve Lie, who admitted during his term as Secretary-General of the United Nations (1946 to 1952): "the fate of the world today depends first and foremost on statesmen, secondly on interpreters".
To what extent is this sentence still relevant today? In the blog post on machine translation, we have already taken a look at the powerful advances in translation technology. This can also be observed with speech recognition and automated interpreting. Would one have been prepared 70 years ago to entrust the fate of the world to an automatic interpreter? Just as in the case of written texts, automatic interpretation is very powerful, but it still lacks typical human skills, such as a strong sense of language and deep technical knowledge. Interpreters are also often needed in situations where additional mood factors can be decisive. In a negotiation, for example, it can be important that empathy or humor is transmitted correctly and with great sensitivity. The fate, if not of the whole world, then at least of a state or a company - after all of many people - can depend on it.
Interpreting not only requires a high degree of responsibility, but also an extreme intellectual effort. This varies depending on the type of use. There are different interpreting techniques that can be more or less suitable for different situations. The main variants are simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, whispering interpreting, sign language interpreting and written interpreting. Special forms are relay and retour interpreting. The faster the spoken text has to be heard, understood and translated, the more intensive and complex the interpreter's work will be. Neurology has long known that multitasking is an illusion. Our brain cannot really take care of two tasks at once (for example: listening/translating/speaking). This apparent simultaneity is only possible thanks to ultra-fast, repeated switching of the brain from one task to another - and back again. During routine tasks, such as taking a shower or driving on a familiar route, people often let their thoughts wander to other tasks in order to solve them in advance in a planned manner. However, no trace of the routine task remains in consciousness. In the typical example, you have already thought about the shopping list during the trip home, but you don't remember exactly which route you took. Interpreters must not neglect any of their previously mentioned tasks, and sometimes the operation of interpreting equipment is added to this. For this reason, in almost all cases, two interpreters are absolutely necessary, alternating at regular intervals to allow the brain to recover and keep attention. In the best case, the change is so seamless, as in a relay race, that the audience hardly notices anything.
Quotations for interpreting services sometimes cause astonishment among recipients: the need for the double pack interpreter means that their remuneration is calculated at least as a daily rate, even if the assignment lasts only half a day or less. This is because interpreting is really comparable to a high-performance sport. Before and after a 100 m sprint at the Olympic Games, runners need a rest period, even though the actual performance phase itself is very short. This means that no interpreter can concentrate sufficiently on two different assignments on the same day. The training is also included: professional interpreters prepare themselves extensively for the assignment.
After all these considerations, it is clear to us: surprise should rather come from very cheap interpreting offers, because experienced interpreters know the value and challenges of their job very well. They prefer to cancel an order if the conditions do not allow for an all-round excellent operation.
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