Interpreting

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope that 2024 is off to a good start for all of you. Here’s the news from Training for Translators:

• I wrote an OT (off-topic) post about my family’s recent trip to Belize (we loved it!!)
• The T4T training year kicks off today, with a one-hour class on Using objective data to set your freelance rates. Registration ($50) includes the recording.
• Tomorrow, the four-week session of Getting started as a freelance translator or interpreter…in the age of AI kicks off. Registration is $190, and members of the American Translators Association can use coupon code ATA for $30 off

On to this week’s topic: Combining translation and interpreting in your freelance business. A couple of readers have suggested this topic (if you have a topic you’d like me to address in a future newsletter, just reply to this e-mail!).

For context, from 2002 (when I started freelancing) until 2019 (when I passed the Colorado state court interpreter exam), I was exclusively a French to English translator. From 2019 until 2021 (when I graduated from the Glendon College Master of Conference Interpreting program), my work volume was about 90% translation and 10% interpreting, particularly because court interpreting dropped to almost zero for the first few months of COVID, and I turned down most interpreting assignments during the year I was studying at Glendon.

When I finished the Glendon program, my goal was to be 50/50 translation and interpreting within a year and a half of finishing the program (meaning, by the end of 2022), and I thought that this was wildly optimistic, because I didn’t know much about the conference interpreting market, there’s very little in-person conference interpreting work where I live, and I assumed (incorrectly) that most conference interpreting work was going to go back to in-person once the acute phase of the pandemic was over. In reality, interpreting work is booming: in 2023 I earned US $65K from interpreting–12K from court interpreting and 53K from conference interpreting–and I did almost 200 days of interpreting (103 court assignments and 90 conference assignments). This was almost double the amount of interpreting I did in 2022, while my translation work stayed stable (32K in 2023 as compared to 33K in 2022). If you didn’t read my 2023 wrap-up post with the details, here it is.

In the past year and a half, I’ve come to a few realizations about combining translation and interpreting:

• Most importantly, I really enjoy doing both. One reader who suggested this topic observed (and I agree) that it’s relatively uncommon to really combine translation and interpreting: you’re more likely to encounter interpreters who occasionally translate at times of the year when interpreting work is slow, or translators who do a small amount of court interpreting, for example. I actually really enjoy doing real amounts of both translation and interpreting, and I hope to continue this!
• I find that interpreting makes me a better translator, and translating makes me a better interpreter. Interpreting has taught me a lot about focusing on meaning, rather than words; using shorter, simpler ways of expressing complicated concepts; knowing when to add a little flair and when to cut out the fluff. Translation has taught me a lot about finding precisely the right word; slowing down instead of rushing; making sure that the expression is exactly what I want. I feel like both skills have benefited each other.
• I’ve also come to appreciate the advantages of both translation and interpreting. When you finish an interpreting assignment, whether it went well or poorly, it’s over. Even if you were recorded (which allows you to go back and obsess over what you said!), there’s no way to change it. As one of my music teachers once told me, the reason not to obsess over music mistakes is that by the time you hear them, they’re already over. This is a beautiful thing about interpreting! The beautiful thing about translation is taking as long as you want (as long as you meet the deadline!) to pick just the right word. When you’re interpreting, you have about a quarter of a second to contemplate the difference between the words “maybe” and “perhaps,” or “careless” and “reckless.” At times it can feel like being fired out of a cannon, and I’ve come to really appreciate the luxury of time when I’m translating.
• It can also be challenging to combine the two, in terms of workflow. Because I (fortunately) have a good deal of interpreting work, I’m often too busy to take on last-minute, large translation projects. I’d like to find at least one new, steady translation client, but I really don’t want a “2,500 words for tomorrow” type of client, because I’m interpreting more days than not. Translation work that blends well with interpreting is definitely somewhat of a niche market.

Then, there are the business aspects of translation and interpreting. A few observations there:

• Interpreting, at least the flavors of interpreting that I do (mostly remote simultaneous, and court) is really in demand. It took me about the same amount of time (18 months) to really “launch” as translator in 2002 and as an interpreter in 2021, but marketing my interpreting services involved a lot less work.
• Interesting, well-paid interpreting work tends to find me, whereas I have to knock on a lot more doors to find interesting, well-paid translation work. I don’t feel, at all, that the translation profession is dying. Here’s a post I wrote about where I think the whole MT/AI push is headed. At the same time, there’s a much smaller pool of French conference/court interpreters than the pool of French to English translators. Clients might want to cut corners on interpreting, but you can’t really do simultaneous interpreting if you haven’t studied and practiced it extensively, and automated interpreting is way behind machine translation. I lose a lot of translation work because the client finds someone cheaper, and it’s pretty rare that that happens with interpreting.
• For reasons that I keep mulling over, without a clear answer, interpreting agency rates haven’t cratered in the way that translation agency rates have. I’d estimate that translation agency rates have dropped by about half in the 20+ years that I’ve been a translator, while I have several interpreting agency clients that voluntarily raised their rates in the past few years. I’m really not sure whether this is a case of increased translation automation, more freelance translators entering the market (giving an “anyone can do it” flavor to the profession), interpreters exerting pressure on other interpreters not to decrease their rates, fewer interpreters entering the market, interpreters who dropped out of the market during COVID or because they hate remote interpreting, all of these factors, none of these factors, or something else entirely.

Overall, I am very, very happy that I decided to pursue interpreting in addition to translation, and I’m happy with the mix of clients that I have right now. If you are also considering such a career pivot, I would encourage it, and I hope that these tips are helpful!

This month’s master class, How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreting exam, is next Wednesday, November 15. The live session runs from 12 noon to 1:30 PM New York time, and registration ($75) includes the recording.

This class is based on my experience preparing for and passing (on the first try!) two sets of court interpreting exams, and my Master of Conference Interpreting exit exams. We’ll discuss how to create a training plan for any type of interpreting exam, why so many interpreters fail interpreting exams, how to use the best available resources to prepare, and how to set yourself up for success on exam day.

I taught this class at the recent ATA conference and it went well, so I’m excited for this online version! You can read the full description and register here.

Boothmate communication in remote interpreting

The vast majority of my conference interpreting work is remote, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to make the online interpreting experience more pleasant for me and more effective for my clients. I actually really enjoy remote interpreting, but one of the main challenges when you’re not sitting in a booth together is communicating with boothmates. 

On a basic level, you have to agree on the handover procedure (how to organize the switch from one interpreter to another) and the duration of shifts. It’s also helpful to be able to ask or answer terminology questions, send your partner a tip about something you heard that they missed, reshuffle who is going to interpret what, and other communication issues. 

My least favorite way of doing this is via the in-meeting (Zoom, WebEx, etc.) chat. This method comes with several drawbacks and risks:

• One can easily send a message to the wrong person (or even to the entire meeting!)
• The chat is often busy with messages from meeting participants, so every time you see a red dot, it’s difficult to know whether someone is messaging you specifically
• There is little to no flexibility with settings and workflow (enabling/disabling audio notifications, using video)
• What if the platform freezes, or your boothmate’s connection drops, or you and your boothmate(s) find yourselves in different virtual rooms? The team is left scrambling for a means of communication

For these reasons, I much prefer using an external communication platform (bonus points for interpreter-specific features!).

What I had been using…

It’s possible to use an external video channel such as a (second) Zoom meeting, FaceTime, Skype, etc., but this can require an additional device, and none of these video conference tools have interpreter-specific features such as a handover button (one click that lets your boothmate know that it’s time to switch). 

It’s worth mentioning that of course, a potential solution would be for the client to use a videoconferencing platform that has interpreting features built in. There are plenty of them out there (Kudo, Interprefy, etc.), but they don’t seem to have a lot of uptake among my clients, and more than 90% of my interpreting work is over Zoom, Webex, or similar online platforms. 

The default back-channel communication method, at least among the interpreters I work with, is WhatsApp, probably because:

• Nearly every interpreter is already on WhatsApp
• You can choose whether to just do messaging, or to do a video call 
• WhatsApp has automatic sound alerts (a “ping” tone when someone messages you) that can be helpful when you’re already trying to watch the conference presentation, the in-meeting chat, your reference documents, your terminology resources, etc. 

But still, WhatsApp has its issues. Of course, it has no interpreter-specific features. Many people don’t like to use it for security reasons and because it’s associated with Facebook/Meta, and from the online privacy/security standpoint, it has access to your contacts. Additionally, you have to do some fiddling with WhatsApp’s settings in order not to get notifications from other people while you’re working.

Enter Cymo Booth

Amélie Roy, a buddy from the Glendon College Master of Conference Interpreting program, and one of my most trusted boothmates, recently asked if I’d be willing to try Cymo Booth, which bills itself as “The Zoom back channel for professional interpreters.” My first reaction was, I’m interested, but do we really need to install and learn to use yet another tool? However, Amélie assured me that Cymo Booth was super user-friendly and that I could try it with literally one click: only one interpreter, the virtual booth host, needs to have a Cymo Booth account, and the other(s) just click(s) on the link to access the virtual booth. After a short test (Amélie had done more extensive testing on her own), we decided to try Cymo Booth for our upcoming assignment, with WhatsApp (our previous go-to) open in the background as plan B. 

After this first test run of Cymo Booth, I can say that I love it! That’s the executive summary. Essentially, Cymo Booth allows you to:

• See your partner if you want to (or you can keep the camera off)
• Talk to your partner if you want to (or you can turn the mic off)
• Message your partner using either pre-set messages (“Mic on”) or by typing your own messages (you can configure new pre-set messages or just type whatever you want)
• Send a handover cue with one click 
• Adjust your boothmate’s output volume on Cymo Booth, which means that you can listen to both the meeting audio and your boothmate’s audio at your desired relative volume (instead of being stuck with the preset relative volume in Zoom or using a separate audio mixer tool)
• Do all of the above in the background; your use of Cymo Booth will be invisible to the client and the other meeting participants. 

So, while we were interpreting in Zoom, Amélie and I could hear each other and message each other in Cymo Booth. We didn’t use video while interpreting, but turned our cameras on to chat with each other during breaks in the event we were interpreting for. 

Cymo Booth’s advantages

Here’s what I love about Cymo Booth:

• It’s a very lightweight, non-invasive program; it didn’t interfere with the sound settings for any of my other software (as has happened with other back-channel solutions)
• All of the features worked on the first try – no bugs
• Using Cymo Booth helps you avoid last-minute channel-switching in Zoom. This is something that makes more sense if you’ve interpreted in Zoom, and it’s one of those small thing/big thing issues (details below, skip this part if you already understand the concept of channel-switching!). 

In Zoom, if you want to listen to your partner, you have to set your outgoing channel to the opposite language from theirs; so for example if your partner is interpreting into French, you have to set your outgoing channel to English in order to set your incoming channel to French (the incoming and outgoing channels can’t be the same). You definitely want to do this at least once during your partner’s turn, to make sure that their sound is good. But if you stay on the “wrong” channel for your partner’s entire shift, you risk forgetting to switch to the correct outgoing channel when it’s your turn. This sounds like a stupid, easy-to-avoid mistake, and it is, but (believe me), RSI involves so many cognitive tasks that basically every interpreter who does RSI has ended up interpreting on the wrong channel at one point or another. Using Cymo Booth gives you the option of quickly checking your partner’s sound in Zoom, then switching your Zoom settings back to the ones you want for your interpreting shift, while continuing to listen to your partner in Cymo Booth. You can also keep an eye (visually) on Zoom to make sure that your partner is not muted and is on the correct channel. 

• You can mute and un-mute your partner in Cymo Booth. Again, this seems like a small thing, but it’s really helpful to not disturb your boothmate to ask them to mute or unmute. Just mute or un-mute them by right-clicking on their video panel (whether or not their video is on)
• I found Cymo Booth’s messaging interface really well-designed. The font is very easy to read, your and your partner’s messages appear in different colors, and if you close down the chat panel in Cymo Booth, the messages appear as pop-ups in front of your Zoom window, which is really helpful if your partner is messaging you something critical, like “She said 10 thousand, not 10 million.” 

In short, I found that Cymo Booth resolves a lot of the nagging issues with other common back-channels. It’s “donationware” (don’t worry, I donated!), which means that there’s no obligatory cost, but you make a donation of your choice after you use the software. Personally, I prefer the simplest tool that gets the job done: communication between interpreters doesn’t require a million features. I found that for my tastes, Cymo Booth is that least-complicated yet interpreter-comprehensive option, and I’m looking forward to using it again!

July 2 will mark one year since I received my exit exam results from the Glendon College Master of conference interpreting program. It’s been an exciting and interesting year, so I thought I’d report on how things have gone, and are going.

-My conference interpreting work volume is about what I expected: it takes a while to build up, and I’d say that conference interpreting is more networking and referral-based than cold marketing-based. But I’m happy with the quantity, type, and quality of the work that I have, and I love the actual interpreting work even more than I thought I would. Overall, I’m very happy with the decision to do a conference interpreting Master’s, and with this new career direction.

-I had originally set a goal to have my work volume be half translation and half interpreting within one to two years of graduating from the Glendon program, and it looks like that’s going to happen. I just switched from Excel sheets to QuickBooks Online for accounting (a painful but ultimately very worthwhile process that might be the subject of another post), so it’s easy to see where my income is coming from. In the first five months of 2022, the amount I earned from interpreting for agencies has almost equaled the amount I earned translating for direct clients, and it’s an amount that I’m happy with.

-I feel like the Glendon program prepared me really well for the real world of conference interpreting. I think that doing an AIIC-level conference interpreting program makes a huge difference in one’s interpreting skill and confidence and is well worth the time and money. And here, you heard me say it, a couple of my favorite assignments this year involved long consecutive, which was the source of at least one sobbing breakdown during the program. If you’re learning long consecutive, stick with it!

-In terms of professional development, I was approved as an AIIC pre-candidate (and AIIC now allows pre-candidates to publicly state their pre-candidate status), and also started participating in a couple of really helpful online interpreter practice groups, plus participated in Sophie Llewellyn Smith’s French B Atelier course, and I’m registered for this summer’s CoLab workshop in Toronto.

-I have lots of observations about the differences between translation and interpreting (I’m still translating as much as ever), but here’s a major one. I think it could be challenging to launch a freelance interpreting business if you’re not already self-employed or if you don’t have a flexible schedule. In my experience, most beginning freelance translators launch their businesses by working another job alongside their translation work, until they have enough freelance work to cut the cord. I think that could be harder (not impossible, but harder) with interpreting. As a newbie, a lot of clients are going to start you with work that is less desirable, schedule-wise: the classic example being the one-hour assignment in the middle of the day, or things that start early or end late, or “the other interpreter is having a power outage, can you start NOW?” I actually enjoy those kinds of assignments because I’m already self-employed anyway, but it’s something to consider if you’re making the leap from another job.

-On the other hand, I think that interpreting, and particularly conference interpreting, can become economically viable faster than a fledgling translation business generally does. In most cases, a minimum charge conference interpreting job is going to pay a lot more (perhaps 10x more) than a minimum charge translation job, because most conference interpreting work is going to be billed by the half day or full day, rather than by the minute or hour. When I first started translating, a lot of my translation work was minimum charge jobs paying less than $100, and it takes a lot of those types of jobs to add up to a full-time income.

A reader asks: I recently took a test for doing over-the-phone interpreting. Unfortunately, I stumbled a bit and things didn’t go quite as planned. What are some good resources for improving interpreting skills?

A lot of people have this type of question about interpreting, so let’s take a look. Before I answer, I should say that:

-I am still a relatively new interpreter myself. I passed the Colorado French court interpreter exam in 2019, and I passed the exit exams for my Master of Conference Interpreting in 2021.

-However, I’ve taken two high-stakes interpreting exams and passed both on the first try, so in that sense I have some ideas for this reader, and for anyone else looking to pass an interpreting test.

Improving your interpreting skills in general

This is the subject of many books by people with a lot more experience than me, but my top tips are:

-Most importantly, interpreting is like playing a musical instrument: you use the skills, or you lose them. I have a personal rule that I have to interpret or work on my French skills an hour a day on weekdays. If it’s a day when I’m not interpreting for work, then I practice for an hour, every single weekday, no matter what. When I studied for the court interpreter exam, I practiced about an hour a day for a year and a half, and in the three months before my MCI exit exams, I practiced two hours a day. For me, consistency really is the most important thing.

-You have to know your weaknesses, because improving means working on your weaknesses. I think the best way to zero in on your weaknesses is to work with an interpreting coach, preferably someone whose A (native) language is your B (non-native from/into) language.

-You need to identify one goal, or maybe two goals, for each practice session, and they need to be really specific. “Improve my into-B interpreting” isn’t going to get you anywhere. You need to do a practice session where you say, I’m specifically working on eliminating “uhhh” and “ummm,” and on never starting a sentence with “Because.” Or, I’m working on not sticking too closely to the original so that I never start a sentence without knowing how to finish it.

-If you’re a native English speaker and mostly learned your non-English languages in school, you probably need to work on your B language(s) skills in general. That’s not true for everyone, but honestly, it is for most people; it is for me. In my MCI program, I spent tons of time just working on my French: accent, pronunciation, speaking speed (I speak too slowly because I’m pronouncing everything extra-clearly), cultural knowledge, ability to pronounce proper names correctly, and so on.

-Transcripts are your friend. You really want to look for podcasts and videos with transcripts, so that you can record yourself and compare your interpretation to the transcript. YouTube auto-captions can help; transcripts are better because you can mark them up.

-So here’s what I’d suggest: devote some time to just improving your B language skills. Shadow YouTube videos (slow down to .75 speed if needed; I had to do that at the start). Flood your brain with that language: listen to podcasts and news shows in that language as much as you can. My go-to for French is France Culture. When I was in my MCI program, I listened to France Culture up to three hours a day: when I was exercising, driving, cleaning, eating, really any time I could. I’m a big fan of flashcards: to this day, I keep a ring of flashcards on my desk, and whenever I have a spare moment, I flip through three or four of them to test myself.

-Then work on your interpreting skills, but in a targeted way. Thankfully these days there are tons of resources: Speechpool, the EU Speech Repository, and the zillions of videos on YouTube. If you’re studying for an interpreting test, it’s almost certain you can find samples to practice with on YouTube. In just a cursory search, I found this YouTube channel that has practice videos for immigration court, this one that has practice videos for medical interpreters, this one on phone interpreting, and I’m sure there are more.

-I think that sight translation is an often-overlooked practice technique. Athena Matilsky (who I studied with for the court interpreter exam) called it “simultaneous with training wheels,” and I agree. If you force yourself to do sight translation at a pretty good speed and without pausing (treat it like simul: if you really don’t know a word, come up with a synonym, reformulate, or skip it; never allow yourself to pause or backtrack), it’s a good approximation of the skills involved in simul. In my MCI program, this is how we moved up to interpreting high-level diplomatic speeches: first we sight-translated them from transcripts.

-Consider joining an interpreter practice group. I joined Amerivox and I’ve gotten a lot out of it; highly recommended! Joining a practice group also gives you the opportunity to work as an interpreter for other interpreters; I volunteered as both a relay and bilingual interpreter for Amerivox and got a lot out of it. Like playing music for other musicians, it forces you to be on your A-game because you know that the other interpreters are hearing every single mistake.

-If you can, do a formal interpreter training program. It really does make a difference, and I’m incredibly glad that I did the Glendon MCI. Finding ways to practice interpreting on your own isn’t hard, but evaluating your own interpreting is really, really hard, and without that feedback it’s tough to tell if you’re improving, or just reinforcing the same mistakes. If it’s not realistic for you to do a full Master’s program, at least try to do some sort courses where you’re getting feedback from instructors in your language combination.

How to pass an interpreting test

Passing an interpreting test is another question altogether. I would recommend that you:

-First, get as many details about the test as you can. This reader mentions taking a test for an OPI (over-the-phone interpreting) job and it not going well. Ahead of any interpreting test, I would definitely try to find out: how long is the test, consecutive or simultaneous, in which direction(s)? If it’s consecutive or includes a consecutive component, how long are the segments in terms of time or number of words? If it’s simultaneous, how fast (in terms of words per minute) is it?

-For some exams, such as court interpreter certification exams, you’ll be able to get exact details on all of these pieces of information. For exams administered by agencies, the information you receive is at the agency’s discretion. You also want to try to find out as much as you can about how the exam is scored. Some exams use scoring units, where certain words are designated as being scored, while other exams may use a holistic assessment tool. Some tests may put a lot of emphasis on accent and delivery, others almost none.

-Most importantly, remember that when you are taking a test, your goal is to pass the test. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but here’s what I mean: every type of test assesses certain types of skills, so those skills are what you need to demonstrate. For a court interpreting test, it’s more important to be complete, accurate, and fast, than it is to have flowing delivery. For a conference interpreting test, delivery and focusing on the message rather than the words might be your goal. For my MCI exam, I had a post-it note on my desk that said, “Breathe. Smile. Cut the fluff.” Additionally, do not stress out (right now) about any real or perceived differences between what the test requires and what you feel will be required in a real-life setting: first you have to pass the test. Here’s what I mean by that: the simultaneous passages on many court interpreting exams are recorded at about 125 words per minute. In real life, very few people speak at 125 wpm in any kind of setting; in most settings 140-180 is probably more realistic, and in court where people are often nervous and rushing, speeds up to 200 words per minute aren’t out of the question. But right now you don’t worry about that: you worry about passing the 125 wpm passage.

-Here’s a great one from Andrew Clifford, the director of the Glendon MCI program that I did. Rather than focusing on giving a world-class, once-in-a-lifetime performance on the day of the exam, focus on using the weeks/months before the test to improve the overall level of your interpreting. Instead of aiming for a 99% performance on test day, aim to improve your interpreting enough that 80% of your best is good enough to pass, because exam-day nerves are going to degrade your performance. This helped me a lot. Our MCI exit exams consisted of four tests (consec and simul in both directions), given on two different days. Instead of telling myself on test day, “This is it…the biggest day of your fledgling interpreting career…better not mess it up,” I told myself, “All you have to do is what you’ve already done hundreds of times in the booth: do a solid job with no major mistakes.”

-Try not to fall victim to “snowball syndrome.” Of the people I’ve talked to who’ve failed an interpreting test that they expected to pass, many of them stumbled on something early in the test, got rattled, and things went downhill from there. To prevent this, I would highly recommend practicing on passages that you know are really hard and where you’re likely to miss something or be unable to keep up. Put YouTube videos on 1.25 speed, or practice with the “Advanced/Test-type” speeches on the EU Speech Repository (they are realllllly hard!). That helps you train your reflexes for when you miss or can’t figure out how to interpret a major term, like if the speaker says “Our topic today is the banded archer fish,” you just say “the fish we’re discussing.” Or when the speaker rattles off a long list of names and you got none of them, you say, “Our esteemed guests.” It’s not perfect, but it’s better than losing the entire next sentence because you’re flipping out about the banded archer fish.

-Practice on the most realistic material that you can. For the court interpreter exam, I practiced with as much actual court audio footage as I could get my hands on. For my MCI exams, I practiced every French and every English speech in the Glendon speech repository, along with tons of speeches from Speechpool and the EU Speech Repository. Again, you’re practicing a specific skill for a specific purpose, so align your practice materials as closely as possible to that.

Readers, other thoughts on this topic??