會議口譯指南
Professional conference organisers, if not interpreters themselves, may not always wish fully to apply internationally accepted professional standards, although many have learnt from experience that this can lead to unsatisfactory interpretation.
Most colleagues involved in recruiting interpreters will have either been your teachers in interpreters’ school or will have the same language combination as you. Any AIIC member may and can recruit.
Wherever the offer comes from, it is your responsibility to be aware of the terms and conditions of employment in the profession and to ensure that they are observed. Colleagues will explain if the intricacies of team strengths, language combinations, per noctems, etc. defeat you.
Read your contract before you sign it and always keep sour engagements’ book up date. Reply promptly to letters and offers of work. If you publish a telephone number make sure that somebody is usually there to answer and knows your availability, or invest in an answering machine and check it daily.
Open envelopes containing documents immediately, even if you do not need to study them until much later. Contracts, programmes or details of changes of venue may be hidden among a pile of conference papers and organisers are justifiably irritated when phoned for information that has already been sent out.
Once you have signed a contract, do not try to get out of it because someone has offered you something more attractive. If you need to be replaced, find out if a suitable colleague is free on the date(s) concerned, without further details at that stage, then approach the person who recruited you to see if the colleague you propose is acceptable. The person who recruited the team will have taken care to ensure that it is balanced linguistically and otherwise and will not be pleased if you disturb that balance. Remember that your reputation for reliability will suffer if you ask to be replaced.
II. PREPARING FOR A MEETING
It is a good idea to have a system to keep track of documents (past or current) relating to a particular subject or organisation. Unless you have a photographic memory (and even that can become clouded with time and overloaded) adopt a method for indexing key words, including the titles of officials and committees, with their translation into each of your working languages, so that you can retrieve them easily when needed. The bette
