The role of the Interpreter in business and events

In a social reality where interconnections and contacts between people from different cultures increase, the value of the profession of interpreter for events becomes fundamental to establish communication between two or more actors who do not share the same language code.

The interpreter, in fact, is part of the general concept of intercultural mediator: unlike the translator, he does not translate word by word, but faithfully transposes the meaning of the message from one language to another. A further difference with translation is that you have to work on fast messages that have to be transmitted instantly, so you have to look for an appropriate style with much more concise times.

A specific example of the activity is negotiation interpretation: in this mode, the interpreter works most of the time memorizing short messages and making them in the target language in the presence of two or more people. Negotiation interpretation is usually the most requested interpretation in the business environment, used as a fundamental tool during business meetings, contract stipulations, economic negotiations and company meetings.

Conference interpretation, as the name suggests, takes place during trade fairs, conferences and congresses with a strong international dimension. In such contexts, different methods of interpretation can be used: the most relevant are simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, to which is added chuchotage, as a particular variant of simultaneous interpretation.

In simultaneous interpretation, the act of interpretation of the speech by the interpreter occurs simultaneously with the development of the speech itself. Simultaneity is spoken of, not contemporaneity, because, if we exclude when the interpreter correctly anticipates the sense of speech, there is always a gap of time, called décalage, more or less wide, which also depends on the difference, from the syntactical point of view, of the two languages used.

In simultaneous interpretation, the interpreter works inside a soundproof booth equipped with a console, thanks to which he can listen to the speaker through headphones and provide the interpretation, simultaneously, through a microphone, transmitting it to the entire audience connected with special headphones.

Consecutive interpretation is the oldest form of interpretation. This mode consists in making the speech after the speaker has finished or paused: while he is speaking, the interpreter memorizes everything that is said, helping himself with particular notes so that his translation is as faithful as possible to the original text. The length of the portions of speech interpreted varies from situation to situation: now, in fact, much faster times are preferred, around a few minutes so as not to bore the audience.

The whispered interpretation, or chuchotage (from the French chuchoter, i.e. “whispering”), is a variant of the simultaneous interpretation that now seems to be the most widely used: the interpreter is next to the listeners, to whom he transmits the translation in a low voice. This type of interpretation has the advantage of not needing any equipment, but it can only be used if the number of users of the translation is very limited (generally two or three). Moreover, due to the interpreter’s effort in transmitting the translation in a low voice and the acoustic conditions that may be unfavourable, the interpreter may work in this mode only for a limited time.

Hostess & Promoter provides both event interpreters and hostesses and stewards with professional language skills for all the languages of the European Union and most of the languages of the world such as: Arabic, Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Catalan, Hebrew, Estonian, Flemish, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Sign Language languages.