How to Land a TED Lesson

As I write this post, my TED Lesson on How Interpreters Juggle Two Languages at Once has been viewed nearly 800,000 times. In an animated video that is barely five minutes long, the lesson sheds light on an insanely stressful occupation most people know nothing about. The TED lesson makes viewers aware of the key […]

Challenge Results are In. And They are Telling

Wondering about the results of the NTIF Interpreting Technology Challenge? Wonder no more! As it turns out, the weather was a bit too cold for ice-cream anywhere else in Helsinki, on November 24, 2017. But the temperature at Scandic Paasi Hotel was mounting fast as contestants and voters gathered for NTIF’s first Interpreting Technology Challenge. Six of the most […]

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 […]

Mind your language, you @#x!$%* !

A woman's face, in black and white. Only a part of the face is visible, from the nose to the chin. She has her index finder on her lips.

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by the BBC in connection with an incident involving the interpreter who watered down parts of President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly that were critical of the Iranian regime. Detailed transcriptions of both the original and the interpretation can be easily found online. The interpreter was […]