“Interpreting and Technology: Interplay and Transformation” is taking place on 7-9 December 2022 The hybrid conference organised by the Hong Kong Baptist University promises to be an exciting event for interpreters, both established and aspiring; interpreter trainers; researchers; industry watchers; and anybody who is curious about the...
Why do interpreters say they need better sound than normal listeners? And what’s wrong with sound quality in video-conferencing?Here’s a quick guide. Why is my interpreter saying the sound quality isn’t good enough? I can hear the speaker just fine!There are two issues here. The first is that interpreters need to be able to hear...
Sharing a physical space with your boothmate has numerous professional and personal advantages over working alone from home. Covid lockdowns and the rise of the Remote Simultaneous Interpreting (RSI) platform have had an extraordinary effect on the interpreting profession. One of the big changes is that conference interpreters are no longer...
Letter to Count Smorltalk Dear Count Smorltalk, This could be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Because I believe you need a friend. I believe you must be terribly lonely. In your Trolley Folly post, you painted this sad self-image of a suitcase-lugging, colleague-bugging conference interpreter who had to wrestle through the work day. What...
Count Smorltalk asks the question: is this the end of the road? When I was little, nobody had had the genius idea of adding wheels to suitcases. I reckon that the late dawning realisation that you could add wheels to bags is a prime example of linguistic determinism: we called it luggage because we lugged it. End of. I was lucky to...
The issue of interpreter visibility has been discussed many times, and it remains an ongoing discussion. I was reminded of it just recently when I read an interview with an interpreter who repeated the old mantra of the invisible interpreter. It was something along the lines of, “I know I’ve done a good job when no one knows I was there.”...
Count Smorltalk does voiceover Many moons ago I wrote about heteronyms. You know, those awkward words spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts. If you only have a second to think about it, how do you know it is second and not second? How did you know it was “How to perfect perfect speech” in the title? Context, as always...
Count Smorltalk cogitates on the machinery of translation Je pense, donc je suis. These famous words, penned by Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode, are a cornerstone of Western philosophy: the fact of thought means that the thinker is real. Later, the words Je pense, donc je suis were translated into...
Count Smorltalk speculates on WER “Well there you are, four candles!’ “No, fork ‘andles! ‘Andles for forks!” If you haven’t ever seen the Two Ronnies sketch The Hardware Shop, do it now: It immortalises the kind of chaos that ensues when one human says one thing and another human hears something else. Genius.Of course, we interpreters listen...
Count Smorltalk fails the Turing test On some dark days in the depths of the Covid lockdown if you had asked my friends whether text messages emanating from my account were generated by human or by computer, they would have answered that the thing the other end was definitely not human. Sadly, at some points during these bleak times I would have...