Links:

• Why I only offer on-site interpreting — It is a trend that is both incredibly promising and incredibly controversial. Remote interpreting, where the interpreter can be located absolutely anywhere and yet still interpret for your event via a phone call or online platform, has become big business and is set to grow even more. So why would any consultant interpreter not jump at the opportunities it offers?
• The Future of Interpreting & Translating – Professional Precariat or Digital Elite? – Dolmetscher wissen alles — Interpreters being paid by the minute (or hour) nowadays does not seem as inconceivable as it used to be. Technically speaking, small worktime and payment units have become easier to handle, thus more probable to be applied. The question arises if working and being paid on a micro or macro level, as the two extremes, bring about any special advantages or disadvantages for interpreters/translators and their customers – a question I would like to share some thoughts with you about, paying special attention to the information and knowledge aspect.
• Remote Interpreting:
 Feeling Our Way into the Future — New communications technologies make interpreting available where it wasn’t in the past. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the way we will work remotely, because what’s going on is game changing and shaking our profession from top to bottom.
• Interpreting Delivery Platforms: Should You Get on the Bandwagon? — In this guest blog post, Hélène Pielmeier, a Senior Analyst at Common Sense Advisory, shares some valuable insights into interpreting delivery platforms (IDPs) and why interpreters should take a serious look at them. 
• Remote Simultaneous Interpreting: Options and Standards - Interpreters Division — Even though experiments with Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) have been taking place since the early 1970s, it is only relatively recently that we have heard more and more about this type of interpretation.
• Technology and Interpreting: Three Questions on Every Interpreter’s Mind

Special Guest: Roberta Barroca.

Special Guest: Roberta Barroca.

Links:

• Fedex - the golden package TV commercial
• Roberta on Twitter — English-Brazilian Portuguese interpreter. I LOVE what I do, I do what I LOVE. Interpreting isn't only my profession, it's a calling.Proud ATA and AIIC member.
• The D.I.V.A. Interpreters — What the newbie didn’t know was that some professionals with countless booth hours develop the Delusional Interpreter’s Vain Arrogance (DIVA) syndrome. I explained to him what the syndrome was all about and reassured him it wasn’t personal. Our conversation went kind of like this…
• OCID – The Overwhelmed Conference Interpreter Disorder (a satirical article NOT to be taken seriously) — Are you a conference interpreter? Do you have nightmares about being late to assignments due to traffic or the alarm not going off? Do you suffer from cold sweats and tachycardia in the booth? You might be suffering from the “Overwhelmed Conference Interpreter Disorder” (hereinafter OCID). However, don’t panic just yet because the Department of Interpreters’ Wellness has carried out a promising new research and issued new guidelines for the treatment of OCID.
• A Hologram, a Peacock or Sinatra – What Kind of Interpreter Are You? — Simultaneous interpreters should definitely get hazard pay for working in a confined space. After all, in the booth we are exposed to our boothmate’s cold and also to some very different personalities, up close and personal. Throughout almost ten years of interpreting professionally, I’ve had the chance to observe my colleagues’ funny and not­so­funny traits. Below, you’ll find a list of some characters I’ve had the pleasure or misfortune of working with…
• My Boothmate: A Love Story (On good booth manners) — “Would you like to sit on the right or left side of the booth?” – he asked. That sounded like music to my ears and I immediately knew this was love at first sight. I said it didn’t really matter so we just randomly chose our seats and started talking before the conference started. After about 15 minutes of getting to know each other, we started preparing for the assignment. As we had both arrived about one hour in advance, we still had some good 45 minutes to prepare.
• My Boothmate: The Heartbreak. (On bad booth manners) — Traffic was particularly bad that Monday morning but because I always leave very early for assignments, I managed to arrive about 40 minutes prior to the opening remarks. My boothmate hadn’t arrived yet so I sent him a text message to let him know I was already in the booth settling in.
• Letter of forgiveness and gratitude to my old self as an interpreter — Dear old me, Today it’s been exactly 9 years and 7 months since I earned my certificate as an interpreter. As I look back at my career, I feel very pleased with all I have achieved and learned but also remember some low points for which now is time I forgive and thank myself for. Here it goes:
• The Golden Package — In the 1994 Super Bowl an insightful and inspirational commercial by FedEx (Federal Express at that time) was broadcasted. I had the opportunity to watch it recently in an assignment as an interpreter and immediately found parallels to my profession.

Special Guest: Franz Kubaczyk.

Links:

• Children interrupt BBC News interview
• Franz Kubaczyk's website
• Frank Deja - Simultandolmetscher
• How Donald Trump Answers A Question
• Bush to Trump: You can't insult your way to presidency - YouTube
• Rampensau | Word of the Week
• BBC NEWS | Europe | Berlusconi jibe sparks EU storm
• Lost in Trumpslation: An Interview with Bérengère Viennot - Los Angeles Review of Books
• Trump says the press mangles his “beautiful flowing sentences.” We asked linguists to weigh in. - Vox
• Revived Nazi-era term 'Luegenpresse' is German non-word of year | Reuters
• Trump’s full inauguration speech transcript, annotated - The Washington Post

Special Guest: Camille Collard.

Special Guest: Camille Collard.

Links:

• Why so few men? : Gender imbalance in conference interpreting — Research into the causes and consequences of a preponderance of women in the profession of conference interpretation and what men think about it - by Rachael Ryan.
• Conference Interpreters: A Female Field – Medium — It’s not a dirty little secret so much as it is undeniably obvious: professional simultaneous interpreters a.k.a. conference interpreters are primarily women.
• (2) Sex Differences in Simultaneous Interpreting: a Corpus-Based Study — Research poster by Camille Collard and Bart Defrancq
• Are women best in simultaneous interpreting? - interpreting.info — Are women the best interpreters? Do their brain or short memory work better than men?
• Gender in Conference Interpreting: Social Constructs, Sexism and Biases | Translations With AM — Scrolling through my feed of endless posts about language, translation and interpreting, I came across this title: “Why so few men?: Gender imbalance in conference interpreting”. The feminist translator in me just couldn’t resist it. I had to read that article even when I suspected I was not going to like what I found. Well, I didn’t. The piece written by Rachael Ryan and published in the website of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) offered, in a very objective manner, an insight into the pervasive misconceptions we all have to deal with on a daily basis, but allow me to share with you what I read into it.
• Gender in interpreting: A non-issue? - interpreting.info — Male interpreters for male speakers - female interpreters for female speakers => What is your opinion on this? And what do our clients think (i.e. did you ever work in a situation where the client specifically requested this)?
• Who make better translators, men or women? | Rosetta Translation — The issue of male versus female performance in translation and interpreting work is one that rarely comes up, but it is one where project managers may be surprisingly opinionated.
• Stress Busters for Interpreters (And Everyone Else) — If the first step in managing stress is to understand it, the second step is to give yourself permission to focus on yourself to deal with it.

Special Guest: Ewandro Magalhaes.

Links:

• LangFM podcast interview with Ewandro Magalhaes
• Ewandro's website
• How interpreters juggle two languages at once — Language is complex, and when abstract or nuanced concepts get lost in translation, the consequences may be catastrophic. Given the complexities of language and cultural exchange, how do these epic miscommunications not happen all the time? Ewandro Magalhaes explains how much of the answer lies with the skill and training of interpreters to overcome language barriers.
• Looking for Interpreter Zero: (2) Enrique, Magellan’s Slave Interpreter — How Enrique, a Malay-speaker acquired by Magellan during the siege of Malacca, became an interpreter and go-between as the expedition searched for the Spice Islands.
• The problem with "merely beginning" — There comes a time in everyone’s career where they will disagree with those who have inspired them. I am a big fan of the short, pithy posts from marketing maestro, Seth Godin but yesterday, he slipped up. Or rather, he missed an important detail.
• How to speak in public — The European Commission's DG Interpretation has been organising training sessions for delegates and meeting chairs for several years in order to promote better communication in multilingual meetings. Participants are given the opportunity to try to interpret different qualities of speakers themselves in order to increase their awareness of How to speak in public -- with a fair chance of being understood. This clip with José Iturri, a senior Spanish interpreter at the European Commission's DG Interpretation (SCIC), gives a short introduction to our delegate awareness program (in EN).
• Smart Speaking, by Calliope Interpreters — Our popular video provides tips to help speakers prepare themselves before addressing multilingual audiences.
• Translation and Interpreting: Getting it Right (ATA) — For non-linguists, buying interpreting services is often frustrating. Many buyers are not even sure they need a professional interpreter since they know someone who is bilingual and willing to help out. Potential clients need to know the value your services can bring to their business. That's where Interpreting: Getting It Right comes in--a straightforward brochure explaining the where, why, and how of professional interpreting services. It's a quick read and perfect for client education.

Transcript

• A quick preview on the upcoming BP conference in Prague
• How to communicate well with clients to help them get the results they want
• The added value of multilingualism
• Val's contribution to Jonathan's book
• (Re)Branding interpreters and the interpreting profession

Transcript to read and add to

Special Guest: Valeria Aliperta.

Intro/outro music: "Quit Bitching" by Broke For Free (http://brokeforfree.com/)

Transcript to read and contribute to

Links:

• The AIIC Workload Study - Executive Summary — AIIC commissioned a Workload Study on interpreter stress and burnout which was completed in December 2001. The study investigated four sets of parameters: psychological, physiological, physical and performance as well as the interaction between them. The psychological aspects were examined via a mail survey questionnaire addressed to a representative sample of freelancers and all permanent members (607 replies, 41% response rate) and a booth survey (all participants in the physiological study). The physiological data collected was blood pressure, heart rate and salivary cortisol levels in a sample of 48 interpreters who wore monitors over a 24 hour period. The physical data measured was booth size, CO2 and oxygen levels, relative humidity, temperature, lighting intensity, ventilation and fresh air flow, covering a sample of 47 booths (23 mobile, 24 permanent) in which the subjects in the physiological survey were working. The performance data was constituted by 6 segments of two minutes each, recorded at the beginning and end of an interpreter’s turns at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the working day. The physical measurements revealed that CO2 and temperature levels were nearly all above ISO standards and that humidity levels fell outside the ranges set by the standards. Fresh air throughput is insufficient.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness | TED Talk | TED.com — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."
• Vicarious traumatization - Wikipedia
• What are Communities of Practice? — I seem to be going on and on about Communities of Practice (CoP). But I can already hear your questions. What are these so important-much-talked-about-in-your-blog communities of practice? Why do you spend so much energy on communities of practice? What difference do they make? A PhD about Communities of Practice for Interpreting? Are you sure?
• The Pros and Cons of Dummy-boothing, or does your Brain need tricking? | Tatiana Kaplun
• Robyn Dean on clinical supervision for interpreting (page 62)
• Nachwuchsprogramm: Verband der Konferenzdolmetscher im BDÜ e.V.
• Interpreters: We Need To Talk — There’s a silent contagion that threatens to kill my profession. It infects both new interpreters, who should be immune and more experienced interpreters, who should know better. It neuters conversation, strangles mental health and suffocates any hope of recognition. It goes by a camouflaged misnomer, “confidentiality.”
• Self-Care and the Interpreter In-Training — So you’ve decided to be an interpreter. Chances are, if you are as detail-oriented and as much of a perfectionist as most of us are, this will be you at one point. Or maybe every single day for the first two weeks of your training programme. (Only on the inside, Paula! Conceal, don’t feel.) I’m here to say something that we’re all thinking: it’s not just you. It’s very likely that anyone who enters highly demanding training programmes like the European Master’s in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) will reach a state of utter despair. I say very likely, because I know there are people out there who study this programme with not an ounce of stress. (I will find you. I will shake your hands. I will steal your superpower.)
• Code of professional ethics (2012 version)
• Stress Busters for Interpreters (And Everyone Else) — If the first step in managing stress is to understand it, the second step is to give yourself permission to focus on yourself to deal with it

Transcript to read and contribute to