Organising interpretation for large conferences : the role of a consultant interpreter

A consultant interpreter fulfils the same role at large conferences as the interpretation division of an international organisation.

• International organisations and interpretation
• Finding the right interpreters
• XIII NAM Summit
• The Third World Water Forum
• Various session organisers

International organisations and interpretation

International organisations such as the United Nations or the European Union hold large conferences regularly. These organisations have a well-staffed interpretation division that provides large numbers of interpreters for meetings almost daily. The same is not the case of one-off large conferences, such as the Third World Water Forum, or the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, or the annual AIDS Conference, which do not have a standing secretariat with thousands of employees. Such conferences usually have several sessions of different committees and groups meeting concurrently.

Providing interpretation services for such events poses a major challenge to consultant interpreters who most often do all the work of recruiting and managing teams of interpreters alone. CIAP was selected twice in 2003 for such large events, first for the XIII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and then for the Third World Water Forum.

CIAP is a network of consultant interpreters in Asia-Pacific. It does not have a central office with staff. Each of its members organises teams of interpreters individually, but can call on the advice and help of the other members. In practice, however, each assignment is handled by a single consultant interpreter.

Finding the right interpreters

Putting together a team of interpreters for any meeting can be tricky. It involves finding the right interpreters with the requisite language combination for the particular meeting, as close as possible to the conference venue, while ensuring that more experienced interpreters share a booth with younger ones. In addition, clients often ask for interpreters with experience in the subject of the conference.

Finding the interpreters who fit these criteria involved many weeks of work, communicating by email and phone with numerous interpreters, responding to many questions, searching for flight connections, negotiating airfares and fees for work. On average, three interpreters were contacted for each interpreter recruited. It is always necessary to provide for back-up arrangements in case a recruited interpreter drops out because of a last-minute emergency.

XIII NAM Summit

For the XIII NAM Summit, held in February 2003 in Kuala Lumpur, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Malaysia chose CIAP to provide all language services. A total of 46 translators and interpreters for English, French, Spanish and Arabic were recruited from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and USA. All the interpreters were members of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (aiic) and were required to have at least ten years' experience in large international conferences, including previous NAM conferences.

Summits are usually preceded by meetings of ministers and senior government officials who, in a sense, do the footwork for the heads of state or government. NAM conferences traditionally cover a very wide agenda and meetings often go on late into the night, since the senior officials and ministers must reach agreement on all the points of the agenda before the heads of state or government arrive for their two-day summit. The timetable of meetings is therefore unpredictable. The chief interpreter and the assistant coordinator must have the ability to provide teams of interpreters for a variety of breakout sessions at very short notice.

CIAP handled all the contacts with the Malaysian Government, the host, as well as with the interpreters and translators, arranging their travel to and from Malaysia, their hotel accommodation, their contracts, their payments. In addition, there were dozens of pages of statements and declarations to translate, review and deliver on time after the conference.

The Third World Water Forum

The 24,000 participants who gathered in Kyoto, Osaka and Shiga, Japan, made the 3rd World Water Forum an even larger event than the NAM Summit, although not all the meetings had simultaneous interpretation.

A team of 50 interpreters was recruited from all over the world, to cover simultaneous interpretation into English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. In addition, there were 150 Japanese interpreters hired by the Secretariat to provide simultaneous interpretation in Japanese and English at many meetings.

Most of the meetings with simultaneous interpretation were held at the Kyoto International Convention Hall (KICH), but some were held in Shiga and in Osaka, towns some 50 Kms away. For those meetings, the transportation and time to get to the venue needed to be arranged. This at times posed problems in getting interpreters back from a distant venue to a meeting room at the KICH for the next session.

Various session organisers

Here, the biggest challenge was coordination, since most of the meetings were organised by different agencies or organisations. The Secretariat of the conference had a hard time ascertaining in a timely manner which meetings needed interpretation and into which languages. To know what languages were needed meant finding out who the participants would be. The CIAP coordinator needed to provide bilingual booths for meetings using only French and English, Spanish and English or only Japanese and English at very short notice.

The many late requests for interpreters or last-minute changes kept the coordinator and assistant coordinator busy updating interpretation schedules and making sure that the interpreters assigned knew when and where they were required. The interpreters' lounge was of crucial importance, being the place where interpreters could always find the latest update of assignments, as well as the coordinator and assistant coordinator, when they were not running around meeting rooms to check that the interpreters were there or when they were not meeting with the Secretariat.

This time too CIAP did all the searching, negotiating with the interpreters, hiring their services, arranging airfares and hotel accommodation, paying out daily subsistence allowances and fees as well as reimbursing airfares after the conference. This involves having the necessary secretarial and accounting facilities.

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