On Freelancing

Conference interpreters work as staff in large international organizations or contractors. The magic of outsourcing and the #freemarket have actually made most interpreters work as independent contractors, or as it is most commonly known, freelancers. In fact, only an infinitesimal percentage of interpreters get to ride the permanent staff gravy train in places like the European Union, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO.

As a freelancer, you’ll enjoy unprecedented levels of #freedom and #flexibility, as well as experience the excitement of running your own business. Forget the 9 to 5 office drudgery, and stodgy socialist concepts like a regular paycheck and social benefits: you are now the lone ranger of added-value creation in the Wild Wild West that is the Language Services Industry.

Unlike an employee, you will not work during certain times of the year. Peak seasons for conference interpreting run from March to July and September to November. This means two things:

1-    During peak season, you will be à droite et à gauche. Murcia on Tuesday, Bern on Wednesday, and Gdansk on Thursday. Your bedtime reading will be embargoed documents that no one could send you until 9 p.m. the night before. You will sip on tea hoping for your melodic voice to recover, and spend your only day off in bed lying in a heap of exhaustion and discarded draft agendas. Friends? Who needs those when you have an assigning officer?

1.1 This is, of course, if you are in an in-demand booth, like the Chinese or the Arabic booth. In the other booths, peak season is whenever people need to learn English, have translations done, or are looking for au pairs.

2-    During low season, it’s time to kick back, relax, and enjoy underemployment. Take pleasure in swiping your carte bleue and watching the balance dwindle as you check it nervously, twice a day.  Thank god BNP Paribas now has an iPhone app, right?! Send emails to your employers reminding them that their payment for your invoice is 8 months late. Receive a curt response, and subtle threats of never being hired again. Become familiar with UNWeb TV, as it will be your only form practice so as to not lose your simultaneous technique, unless someone still in an EMCI programme can secretly share the password to multilingualspeeches.tv (don’t tell anyone, bitte!). And finally, take time to reconnect with your loved ones and field questions about “getting a real job.”

However, it is not all the swing of the seasons, greasy food from the airport McDo, and generally being a brown noser. As a freelancer, you are essentially an entrepreneur. Hope you got mad business skills because homey will be doing accounting, collections, and marketing. The payoff for all your hard work is that half your cash will be spent on taxes to pay for things like la sécu and le remboursement de la dette sociale. It may be painful, but be glad you aren’t in #America, where only millionaires are allowed to visit professionally trained doctors!

Additionally, much of your time will be spent managing your professional calendar. ¡Cuando no hay sequía, hay huracán!  When it rains, it pours! Major interpreter employers have a vested interest in fostering rivalry, miscommunication, and paranoia among their pool of freelancers. Divide ut regnes! There are many murky systems to do this, depending on which market or geographical region you work in.  

Do the words “inquiry”, “option”, “firm offer”, and “right of first refusal” ring a bell? No?! Your plucky interpreting teachers didn’t mention this a single time during your two-year (or three or four, depending on how many times they failed you) EMCI programme? Fear not! Our interpreting intifada at Become a Conference Interpreter! is here to save the day: in our next post we shall explain the finer points of managing your calendar!

On Interpreter Training (Part 2)

Gefeliciteerd! You’ve been accepted into an EMCI programme, along with 10-20% of your fellow applicants. You are now part of something very special, the Oxbridge law set of the language professions, assuming you are part of the 30% who make it through your mid-term exams, of course.  

As an interpreting student, you will be expected to read up on any major news story and know the political ins and outs of any country where your language is spoken. (Sorry, those of you with Spanish, it’s going to take HOURS!) You will occasionally be grilled and subjected to impromptu public questions regarding what colour tie José Manuel Barroso wore last week, and what is so controversial about Denmark’s proposed fishery quotas, anyway?

Your professors and teachers will be seasoned professionals at the top of their game. Yes, you are taking coding from Mark Zuckerberg and Diplomacy 101 from Tony Blair.  Everyone will be better than you in every language, and probably more attractive, too.  Not that that means much. You won’t even comb your hair or brush your teeth until you get a dummy booth week at the Parliament (Speaking of hygiene, unless you are already married or able to shag the occasional starry-eyed translation student, resign yourself to total celibacy. If you are married, prepare for your partner to divorce you in a fit of resentment).

Your teachers and classmates will tear into the way you speak, every day. They will find fault with your accent, your vocabulary, tell you go to home and learn how to speak again. They will threaten to fail you from the programme- and half the time they will indeed translate (pun intended!) those words into action. Soon, the constant criticism will start to slowly choke your spirit, make you doubt your own intelligence, and resent your parents for not teaching you a more refined version of your mother tongue (that is, assuming you have one at all and aren’t a dreaded alingual!). You will develop unusually passionate opinions about EU policies, probably as a coping mechanism. Stockholm syndrome will take hold, and your raison d’être will be to please your instructors. This will probably reach the point where your trainers actively and snidely comment on your personal life, and unironically tell you to change any part of your life that isn’t good for your career. Your girlfriend wants to stay in a city with no organizations that need you? Drop her!!

While your family and non-interpreting colleagues are impressed (or perplexed) that you have made it through such a difficult selection process, you will hear over and over again that the teaching staff sees you as below dirt, a wannabe, a charlatan, a likely grey market thorn in their side. They will reiterate that they are unafraid to fail every single one of you, and tell you about how four years ago they did just that!  

You will be forced to perform with poise several times a day, and it will never be good enough.  You will then attempt to recreate the experience with your classmates during so-called “work groups”, for several hours each evening. You will then go home and read The Guardian, The Economist, Le Monde Diplomatique, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and whatever it is the intelligentsia of Bucharest likes to read. You will wish you were an Arabic or Mandarin interpreter, because they only have to deal with one foreign language (but they work into their B!). Weekends are for having a grasse mat’ until 8:00 a.m. and catching up on all the news you missed while in class. And more work groups.  

On one hand, you will lose weight from lack of time or appetite. On the other, you will emerge but a shell of your former exuberant self, whose newfound mental illness manifests itself in the form of one crise existentielle apres l’autre- Where should I live, assuming I finish alive? Should I activate my English? Is it OK I learned Argentine Spanish and not Madrileño?  How long would it take to add Latvian as a C from scratch?  Can I go back in time and see to it my parents give me up for adoption to a Franco-British family so I can be a double A?  Should I just start learning Flemish now so I’m prepared for a life in Brussels?  Can I parlay that into a Dutch C eventually? Can I afford a Sprachreise in Germany during La Semaine Sainte?
If this all sounds like a lot of effort and suffering, despair not: the road shall be hard, but you must think of the endless years of freelancer glory (and professional psychotherapist fees) that await you!

On Interpreter Training (Part 1)

Here at Become a Conference Interpreter! we know that the key to staffing all 23 booths at the EU (Make that 24, Croatia! Will you share once Serbia makes the cut?) is to conceive appropriate training programmes throughout the United States of Europe. For that reason, today we will focus on being admitted to an interpreter training progamme and what to expect.

Is a European Masters in Conference Interpreting right for you?  It depends.  How many languages do you speak?  Which ones?  Is Italian your mother tongue? (If so, please find a new outlet. Your booth is going to be seeing le vacche magre until Silvio Berlusconi finally gets an ergastolo, which is never).  Did you spend your summers in Malta learning English, and do Erasmus in Aix?  Have a good handle on Deutsch? Did you see L’Auberge Espagnol 6,000 times and decide you wanted to make it a reality?  Love les moules frites and gauffres?  

Not so fast, pessoal! Being an amorphous pan-European with multilingual skills is just one facet of becoming a conference interpreter. Language ability is not all it takes! A good interpreter must possess analytical skills that would bring math and philosophy majors to their knees, have the gift of gab à la Bill Clinton, and enjoy psychological abuse that makes Guantánamo look like Euro Disney. Are you into S&M?  Specifically, the M part? Then an EMCI program might just be a good fit for you! However, before you can begin your training, you must sit an EMCI admissions exam.

All EMCI schools have aptitude tests. The test panel generally includes a majority of professional interpreters, interpreter trainers, and sadists. These tests may vary for a number of reasons to do with the number of applicants, the language combinations offered, institutional constraints, or the mood of the président du jury because there were no more seats on the metro and he had to ride standing up all the way across town, and after his flight home from a six day conference in Dublin on fisheries was delayed by four hours last night.  

These tests are designed to test applicants for the skills and traits mentioned above. These are rigorous tests: conference interpreting is a demanding profession, much like being a spy, a neurosurgeon, or a cosmonaut. Usually, aptitude tests are comprised of a few interpreting exercises and memory tests, followed by an interview, designed to gauge whether or not you have the cultural panache and mental toughness (read: self-flagellating tendencies and thriving on threats of punishment) necessary to endure the next grueling 12-24 months and keep coming back to the trough for more.

You will be convened at 9:00 on a hot summer morning. We advise you bring a bottle of water and a hefty dose of patience, as you might be waiting several hours as your fellow candidates run out of the interview room in tears. When you finally make it into the exam room, be prepared for your every utterance to be scrutinized and torn apart. You will be asked to interpret short speeches without notes from your C languages into your A, and from your A into your B (Don’t know what those are? Don’t you know it’s the interpreter’s job to always be prepared mon gars?!). If the jury is feeling especially sadistic, they will ask you to perform a sight translation. Those aren’t awkward silences, Liebling, but rather judgmental stares! Have them ask you insulting rhetorical questions like: “¿Eso se dice en español?” “Verwendet man wirklich diesen Begriff?” When you attempt to answer, they will cut you off: “No, no existe.”  “Mangelhaft!”  They will then ask you about specific psalms and Biblical references from a speech given in America last month.

Once you are done with your exam, thank the jury, and fight back the tears as you exit the building. Namby pamby sentimentality will only reinforce the fact that you are not ready to begin training. When you arrive home: try to relax. Smoke a joint, take out a hammer, and smash the twenty euro CD you purchased to prepare for the stupid test.  

Soon enough, a very humiliating public announcement will be posted on a bulletin board and online, so you can find out whether you are one of the Chosen Ones (or not). If you are, enjoy the moment.  Smile, have a beer, and celebrate like it’s your last day on Earth.  Your life as you now know it is now over. Forever. Scheiße.  

Love languages? Want to travel? Work for the EU!

There are many ways to become a conference interpreter. However, there are several main features that unite all interpreters: 

- Do years of grueling training!  Have your self confidence and self worth sapped completely by vindictive sadists, and thank them for it!

- Get rejected from professional organizations because you lack experience.

- Learn that you won’t work unless you add English B, Hungerlish and Slavobosnian!

- Learn after you finish that most booths are saturated with interpreters in your situation!

- At one point, start undercutting each other like good youngsters, compete with each other for the glory and savings of SCIC!

- End up nearly suicidal!

- After spending three years being told how important “la relève” is, realize your youth and exuberance are but a liability! You will also develop amazing career opportunities: Translation, English tutoring, waiting tables, piloting a hotel desk!

- Starve when the SCIC won’t give you a test date because you only have four C languages, and none of them are Czech, so the only offers you get are from the grey market!  Be too petrified to be caught on the grey market, so continue starving!

- Spend your first three years after graduating working for free for Amnesty International!

- After you spend all that time and energy and patience, pass your exam, only to find out that once you’ve worked 100 days and they have to up your pay, they forget you ever existed! (And start hiring the most recent graduate!)

- Wind up like any other millennial- poor, alone, and in your childhood bedroom!

- In your childhood bedroom you’ll have plenty of opportunities to reflect on how Mario Benedetti told you to become an interpreter because they needed them because so many were retiring, and how your teachers say the same, but still it’s your fault because this is the labour market and you didn’t see it coming-you weren’t flexible enough!

- Discover that the reason the Baby Boomer generation had it so great in the 70’s was not only the Quaaludes (WTF is this?) (A drug everyone took in the 70s, duh), but because the generation before them did the unthinkable- RETIRE! Whereas the current generation dies of a stroke in the booth at age 90!!

- Think about your own parents’ real estate and debt woes, and realize that anyone born between 1940 and 1960 is in the same boat- that includes your colleagues in the booth.  It dawns on you that whether they want to or not, they will never retire.

- Discover the joy of “disruptive technology." Your competition on the private market is now an iPhone app.

- Live in fear of being blacklisted from AIIC for being too young and eager! Beware of proposing anything that could even make someone think of the boat being rocked!

- Spend a fortune on learning Romanian and professional development courses, only to learn that Romanian C is overloaded once you have the courage to request a new test date!  They need Finnish instead!

- Spend two years on murky websites attempting to communicate with the right person to set up a UN freelance exam, to be told that there simply is no demand for freelancers thanks to the retired staffers still on the market, so they aren’t offering it for your booth right now. Or ever. Your friends who passed it a year ago tell you they have yet to get a single day.  

- Sit in the booth with a colleague who joined AIIC 12 years before your parents even met, and insists that you will NEVER EVER be good enough.

- Consider defecting to the United States, only to learn that the State Department has currently put a moratorium on exams for your language.  You’d have to be a citizen or green card holder, anyway.

- Find out that the moratorium is fake. If they wanted to hire you, they’d call you…but they’re just not that into you.

- To pay the bills and get some practice into your B language as you prepare for accreditation exams, moonlight as a public service interpreter.  Find out that the local conference interpreting market has deemed you stained by such mediocrity and shuns you.

- Learn that after years of trying to get a foot in the door in Brussels, the only place you have any hope of working is Abuja, but despite your pioneering spirit, ECOWAS and Nigeria aren’t forking out visas to foreign freelancers!

On Disruptive Innovation

Here at Become an Interpreter! we have nothing but your best interests at heart, so today we thought we would focus on one of the hottest topics in the Language Services Industry: disruptive innovation.

Much has been said about disruptive innovation as pertains to translation and interpretation professionals. For those of you unfamiliar with the term it means: using technology to fuck over LSPs (Language Service Providers, as we are known in da jargon) and generate huge profits for corporations and startups run by people who do not have the foggiest idea about translation or interpreting.

Disruptive innovation entails tapping into the mystical powers of mobile devices, computers, and the #interwebz to chip away at the working conditions and standards hard earned by generations of professional interpreters and translators.

- Charging a daily fee? Fuck it! Who has time for that? Let’s pay these suckers by hour or the minute.

- Working in teams? Um…if you MUST insist!

- Professionally trained interpreters? Why no! Any talented bilingual can take a whack at it! (Cf. above sentence, it is not that difficult!)

- Remuneration? Sometimes, but only if the startup takes off or if we place you in a certain "premium" category. If you are not onboard with working for free it means you are not a visionary—a stick in the mud, ringard! Might as well take your cheap PC running on Windows ’98 and stick your head in the oven NOW!

Some of the most virulent defenders of these new “service delivery models” are Babelwhore and some reputable interpreter training institutions. While we can understand why a private company has a completely vested interest in ass-raping our professional quality standards into oblivion, we have no idea why professional interpreters and professional associations would get in bed with these people. Unless of course, they are literally, in bed with each other and the characters in question (we know who you are!) are receiving hefty compensations for consulting for these businesses and speaking at events such as this one:

http://www.gala-global.org/conference/think-interpreting

GALA’s conference, the self-proclaimed “global voice of the language industry,” (never mind silly little organizations like AIIC, TAALS, or IAPTI), should be an excellent opportunity for bullshit startups, charlatans, and semi-ethical translation agencies to tool themselves out to clients who (bless their little hearts!) have no idea what kind of services they are buying.

What are your thoughts on the joys of disruptive innovation? Are you enjoying being the language whore of our global village? Join this exciting debate and lâchez vos comms’  !

On Paying Your Dues

We received a lot of reactions about our previous article on the exciting career opportunities available to young professionally qualified interpreters. Many of them came from #Boomers who had run out of their hot flash medication; we did, however, notice a common thread. They all underscored the importance of…

Paying your dues!

Always looking out for you, our team at Become an Interpreter!  has compiled a list of tips on paying your dues:

-       To be successful, you have to pay your dues. No question about that, no way José!

-       In the age of overnight millionaires and billionaires, it seems that everyone wants it now. However if you dig down into a lot of these stories and bios, you will see a common thread peaking through. It did not happen overnight. Why just look at Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, Kim Kardiashian, Paris Hilton…oh wait, they either went to Ivy League schools or made sex tapes.

- So you made it in and out of an EMCI with minimal PTSD symptoms, got an accreditation test date, and passed. They even offered you 80 days your first year! Félicitations, but don't get cheeky and run out to replace all those cosmetics you bought at DM during your EMCI exchange in Heidelberg four years ago just yet. Once you hit 100 days, you become more expensive, and you will be summarily shunned. Don't even consider attempting to remain at the débutant rate and keep working- that's undercutting, and you will (also) be summarily shunned. 

-       Young interpreters need to make themselves available to chief interpreters at all times. This means buying a smart phone with a data plan (but not a démodé Blackberry). It also means diligently following euronews.com and working on your Danish, and moving your domicile to Brussels, where you've heard that even the toilet water is infused with diamonds, and not those off brand synthetic ones either. It means being understanding and not whining when the chiefs tell you that those diamonds were cubic zirconias all along, and there is no demand. No one needs Danish! Everyone added that C 18 months ago! They need Maltese!  Pay a fortune teller to tell you what the language needs will be in 2019- Bulgarian? Or Lithuanian? (Free tip- it won't be Ukranian, so kiss your Odessa dreams goodbye, son)

-       Cancellations are our daily bread and butter. If a client cancels on the morning of a meeting or while you are getting on the plane, stay classy and thank them for the opportunity and wasted time. Don’t forget flexibility is key to success in our global village!

-       Younger female colleagues are often the targets of sexual harassment by older more experienced male colleagues or chief interpreters. If such uncomfortable situations arise, act like nothing is happening and let him touch your junk. Nothing upsets our older colleagues more than bright young things rocking the boat. As our French host father would say: Laisse-toi péloter un peu…ça ira mieux.

-       Never ask for documents or background information. Do not demand fancy ISO compliant equipment or to share the assignment with a colleague. No one likes a diva!

-       Adopt all mobile technologies and sign up for online translation and interpreting platforms. Provide your services for free. After all, it shows that you are onboard with disruptive innovation and global social networks. It is the future after all!

-       Sometimes major companies from the Fortune-500 and the CAC-40 need budget language services too. Build your prestige and reputation by volunteering for them!

These are only some of the main tips to pay your dues on the long winding road of success! Please feel free to add your own insights and tips in the comments section. Remember: the longer the journey, the sweeter the taste once you arrive. Except for social safety nets and retirement benefits, please don’t count on those!