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...
Count Smorltalk raids the minibar – again! British waistlines are testament to the fact that we are a nation of foodies. If any further proof were required of quite how food obsessed we have become, the runaway success of the BBC television show The Great British Bake Off, now in its sixth series and emulated around the world, speaks volumes...
Count Smorltalk reveals all How the Dickens did I end up agreeing to write about interpreting? After all, the only spare time I have is on the Eurostar and those deliciously semi-idle hours are more than adequately filled with vacant flicking through House and Garden Magazine. Ok, on a good day I might take a quick shufti at tomorrow’s docs on...