What Your Interpreter Needs to Know Before the Day

First-time clients almost always underestimate one thing: how much goes into the job of a conference interpreter before anyone sets foot in the room.

From the outside, simultaneous interpreting can look deceptively simple: someone sitting in a booth, listening and talking at the same time. What’s happening underneath stays invisible, and honestly, that’s the point. Good interpreting should feel effortless to the people relying on it. But for that effortlessness to happen on the day, a lot has to happen before it. And some of that, I genuinely need your help with.

Start with the Subject Matter — and Be Specific

When you first get in touch, please tell me what the assignment is actually about. Not “medicine” or “finance” — those words cover an enormous amount of ground. A continuing education seminar for GPs and a research symposium on oncology are both medical events. Linguistically, they have almost nothing in common. The same goes for a routine year-end debrief between long-standing business partners and a first-round negotiation with a company operating under a different legal system entirely.

Interpreters specialise, because specialist language takes time to absorb properly. I have areas I know well, and I will tell you honestly if something falls clearly outside them. That’s not a complication — it’s how a good working relationship is supposed to function, and it’s considerably better than discovering the mismatch mid-session.

What helps from the start: the specific topic, who’s in the room (specialists, a mixed audience, senior leadership?), who’s speaking, and whatever programme or agenda you already have.

Send Everything, Even the Rough Drafts

Preparation is where most of the real work happens.

Simultaneous interpreting places an extraordinary demand on working memory. While I’m listening to one thing, I’m already speaking another — processing meaning, finding the right register, keeping pace with a speaker who isn’t slowing down for anyone. What makes that possible, or at least less vertiginous, is familiarity: with the topic, the terminology, the way the argument is likely to be structured. The more of that I’ve absorbed beforehand, the less I’m improvising in the moment.

So please send me whatever you have. Presentations, even unfinished ones. Background papers. Relevant websites. Legislation that’s likely to come up. If your organisation has a multilingual glossary, that’s genuinely valuable. Consistent terminology across a full day of proceedings is a gift to your audience as much as to me. If you don’t have one yet, I’m happy to help build one.

I sometimes hear: “It won’t be that technical. You’ll be fine.” I don’t doubt it. Send me the materials anyway. What I don’t need, I’ll set aside. What I do need and don’t have is a much harder problem to solve.

Changes: The Sooner, the Better

Conferences shift: a speaker drops out, a topic gets added, the running order reshuffles at the last minute. This is normal, and I’m not precious about it. What matters is that I hear about it in time to do something with the information.

A change that reaches me the evening before is manageable. One that arrives ten minutes before I step into the booth is not. Quality suffers in those circumstances, and it has nothing to do with ability. It has everything to do with preparation time that no longer exists.

If something changes, let me know straight away. A brief message is enough.

A Few Things That Often Go Unsaid

On working in pairs. For assignments lasting more than half an hour, the professional standard is two interpreters working in rotation. Simultaneous interpreting is cognitively intensive in a way that has nothing to do with experience or effort. Concentration simply degrades over time, for everyone. If you’ve received a quote for a full conference day with a single interpreter, it’s worth asking a follow-up question.

On the technical setup. A booth that’s overheating, audio that’s cutting out, a monitor where I can’t see the slides aren’t comfort issues. They affect the quality of the interpretation directly. Having someone check the technical setup in advance, ideally someone who knows what they’re looking at, is time well spent.

On what interpreting actually is. I render what is said — faithfully, completely, without editorialising or softening. I don’t add my own assessment of whether something was well put, and I don’t quietly improve formulations I find clumsy. If you’d like me to play a more advisory role — in shaping language, in preparing speakers, in any capacity beyond interpreting — that’s absolutely a conversation worth having. Just have it beforehand, openly, so we’re both clear on what the brief is.

What Good Collaboration Actually Looks Like

The assignments I remember most fondly all had one thing in common: the client treated me as someone who needed to be informed, not someone who would sort it out regardless.

They sent materials without waiting to be asked. They passed on changes as soon as they knew about them. Sometimes, just before things got started, someone came over to tell me what the speaker was most invested in that day, what the room was likely to be sensitive about, what had been building in the background. It took only two minutes, but it made a real difference.

What happens in the booth is my responsibility. What happens before it is something we share.