Interpreting booth viewed through glass, console and headphones inside, empty

Booth 3 · channel 4 · on mic

Thirty minutes,
then you swap

Simultaneous interpreting is staffed in pairs and rotated at roughly the half hour, because accuracy degrades measurably before stamina does. The second interpreter never leaves the booth.

One shift, from the tap on the shoulder to the swap

00′00

The headphones go on and the clock starts

Interpreters swap at roughly half-hour intervals because accuracy measurably degrades after that, which is why the job is staffed in pairs.

00′03

A notepad with hurried figures and proper names written in a column, pen resting on it — What the ear drops first
Under load the first things to go are numbers, names and lists, which is why they are written down rather than remembered. Read the piece

Three to five seconds behind, permanently

When no interpreter has both languages, the speech goes through a third — and every relay adds delay and one more chance to lose something.

00′12

A conference floor with a delegate headset at every empty seat, seen down the rows — Everything in the booth works, or nobody in this room understands the session
A meeting day is longer than the speaking day, and preparation is most of the work. The whole shift

00′30

Swap. Then the other one has half an hour of it.

Simultaneous interpreting was built at scale for one trial, with four working languages running at once and equipment nobody had used that way before.

A printed proof marked up in two colours of ink with revision marks, on a desk

The same rule, a different unit

Two passes,
two people

Translation is measured in readings rather than minutes. ISO 17100 requires a second qualified translator to compare the target against the source — a step, not a favour — and a record of who did it. Red is the translator's own pass, blue the reviser's; they are kept apart so the file can say who changed what.

Somebody else reads it first

What ISO 17100 asks for · A step in the wrong order · The section