(Last Updated On: September 14, 2018)

There is a need to maintain standards and quality as a professional conference interpreter. As an interpreter, you already know that you must protect your image by having great quality, integrity, and professional ethics. The guide discussed below serves as an advice for both beginners and seasoned, professional conference interpreters or interpreters that just completed their training as a professional.

Conference interpreter - short guide

Tips to follow before the conference

When you are contacted with a job offer, before you accept it ask some important and necessary questions to avoid future embarrassment. Like what the conference is all about, who is the speaker at the conference, your team members and probably your team leader, documents and text regarding the speech, the fee, terms of payment and some others questions you feel that you are entitled to. You may want to also have a written and signed contract to avoid conflicts.

Tips to follow when preparing for the conference

As a professional conference interpreter, you cannot just get into a meeting without preparing for it. In order to provide quality interpretation services you should study the documents pertaining to the conference, though conference organizers are not obligated to provide such documents at a given time. You have to examine the conference documents which contain the agenda of the meeting, texts of the speech to be delivered, the bios about the speakers, PowerPoint presentations and some others. You also have to do a bit of personal research about the event because you might not get all you need from the conference documents. Lastly, due to the information you gather from the conference documents and your own research, prepare a personal glossary for the conference.

Tips to follow during the conference

As a conference interpreter, you have to be early to the meeting to locate your booth and get properly set up before the commencement of the meeting if it is a face to face meeting. You also need to familiarize yourself with the equipment and be sure you don’t have any issues. If you're doing phone interpretation, you need to get into your office where there are no distractions and have your phone close. A professional conference interpreter will also be able to manage crisis that may occur during the meeting, if anything goes wrong. Finally, you must provide quality interpretation to the target audience no matter what the subject is.