Interpreting Technology Tasting (for ice-cream lovers!)
The field of interpreting is undergoing some ground-shaking changes. Ubiquitous broadband has made multilingual streaming a reality. Neural machine translation is flirting with voice recognition. And Google has just introduced its first version of a babel fish that you can literally stick in your ear. Pretty exciting news for users who believe they can now […]
For UN Interpreters, Less is More
Since the release of my video on the language requirements for interpreters in the UN, I have been contacted by many aspiring interpreters with questions that are, mutatis mutandis, more ore less the same. Basically, they want to know whether their language combination qualifies and they also wonder what else they could/should be doing to merit consideration […]
The Accidental Interpreter
This picture was taken in Brasilia, on Tuesday, March 17, 1992. It shows the exact moment when I became an interpreter. The gentleman in a light suit is congressman Ibsen Pinheiro. Sitting diagonally from him is His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. I am the young guy in the middle. Yup. The one […]
Oh, Yes. I’m the Great Pretender
As it turns out, Mr. Jorge Castañeda speaks impeccable English. Yet, after admitting to having spent years “interpreting other people’s bad jokes”, and promising he would do his best not to tell any of his own, he went on to indicate matter-of-factly that interpreting was how he paid his way through college. For a second, I found the […]