Tips for Event Planners

Before the event

The success of your multilingual event depends to a great extent on your interpreters. Preparation is key for them to accomplish their mission effectively. 

You have recruited professional conference interpreters to provide a high-quality service during your conference. Here are some guidelines to ensure optimal conditions for staging your conference.

Speakers
Give each speaker a copy of AIIC’s Guidelines for Speakers to help them derive maximum benefit from professional interpretation.
Remote Simultaneous Interpreting
If you would like part of your event to be virtual with remote interpretation, you should inform your team of interpreters or the Consultant Interpreter from the outset. This technology gives great flexibility to organisers and during the pandemic, it was the only available option in certain instances. However, these events have a high level of technical complexity and require excellent organisation in order to avoid being disappointed. 
Documentation
Make sure the interpreters receive the conference papers, as well as any background information relating to the event, in the relevant languages, as early as possible. They will use these documents to thoroughly prepare the meeting. 
Texts for discussion
When papers are circulated for discussion during the meeting, please ensure the interpreters obtain a copy, as well as any other supplementary information, in advance, if possible in all conference languages. 
Briefing
Depending on the subject, it may be advisable to organise a briefing between the interpreters and the speakers. 
Liaison 
It is advisable to appoint one contact person who will be responsible for the liaison with the interpreters. 
Technical equipment 
Ensure that the equipment supplied is appropriate for the meeting and meets the relevant ISO standards eg. the requisite number of booths and channels. The team leader (or Consultant Interpreter) and the sound engineer should check that all equipment is working properly before the meeting begins.
Projection
If videos or slides are to be shown and require interpretation, please ensure that the screen is clearly visible from the booths and that the interpreters have a direct audio feed of the video. Provide advance copies of the script or presentation to the interpreters.
Interpreters' room 
If possible, make available an office or an area where the interpreters can collect and study conference papers, get their work schedule and receive practical information about the conference. 

Technical equipment for simultaneous interpretation

Simultaneous interpreting requires specialised technical equipment. This includes:: 

──       interpretation booths (one per output language)  
──       interpreter consoles 
──       a mixer and transmission system
──       wireless headset receivers and microphones for participants   
──       headset receivers and microphones for interpreters   

Your equipment supplier and your consultant interpreter can advise you on the technical specification for your meeting.
The booths should be sound-proof and have a silent ventilation system. This will ensure sound for the interpreters and trouble-free listening by delegates.
All equipment must comply with the relevant ISO standards.

During the event

Changes to the programme
Professional interpreters are flexible and can adapt to changes in the programme and to unforeseen circumstances. However, the more information they have, and the earlier they get it, the better they can perform.

Communication with interpreters
It is important for interpreters to be kept informed about new documents that will be discussed. Any speech that is going to be read out loud, should be sent to them as early as possible. Communication with interpreters happens through their team leader.  
 
The team leader liaises between the conference organiser and the interpreters before and during the event, making sure they have the required documents, are aware of the meeting schedule and of any changes to the programme or kept abreast of developments. Moreover, you should also contact the team leader in order to cover any needs that may arise which were not planned for initially. 

Recruiting interpreters from abroad?

The best interpreters for the job will sometimes have to travel from abroad to your conference venue. In recruiting an interpreter from another country you will need to take the following costs into account:

Visas: Interpreters may need a visa for some countries. Visa fees can be quite high and it is customary for the client to pay such fees.

Travel days allowance: For each day (or part day) needed to reach the conference venue and to return home, interpreters are paid a travel allowance.

Daily subsistence allowance (DSA): This covers the hotel accommodation, meals, local transport (taxis, bus tickets to and from the airport) and incidental costs incurred when not at home. Conference organisers may choose to book and pay hotel accommodation for interpreters, as they do for their own staff and delegates. In that case, the DSA paid will not include the cost of accommodation.

Airfares and travel costs: The client will either provide pre-paid tickets to interpreters or will reimburse the cost of travel.

Your AIIC consultant interpreter has an extensive network of partners and will try to find interpreters with the required language combinations closest to the venue, including in the city where your meeting takes place. This can lower the total cost of interpretation considerably.

Case studies

Some practical cases to help you understand the use of active and passive languages.

The Spanish car launch
An international car launch by a Spanish carmaker for journalists from Germany, France and Italy. No questions allowed. These are trade journalists who are used to getting news and information in their own language.
Journalists from Germany, France, Italy and the UK will attend the launch event. Interpretation will be provided from Spanish into German, French, Italian and English. 
You will need interpretation from Spanish into German, Italian, English and French, but no interpretation from those languages back into Spanish. In interpreting terms German, Italian, French and English are active languages, Spanish is passive. 
You will therefore need eight interpreters: two German-speaking, two Italian-speaking, two French-speaking and two English-speaking, each language duo alternating in 30-minute shifts.
They must all have a perfect understanding of Spanish – including automotive terms – and a perfect command of the language they interpret into, usually their mother tongue. They will have thoroughly prepared both the technical and the commercial content of the event. 

The English-Russian-Polish IT meeting
An IT meeting where everyone understands English "computer-speak" but which includes Polish and Russian participants who do not feel comfortable speaking English.
You will need active English and passive Polish and Russian. You will need two English-language interpreters who can work from both Polish and Russian.

An organisation with four official languages
Your organisation's official languages are English, French, German and Spanish.
You will need active and passive English, French, German and Spanish. Participants will be able to listen and to speak any of these four languages.
The English-language interpreters will need to understand French, German and Spanish at a professional level; the French will need a full understanding of English, German and Spanish; and so on. You will need eight interpreters – two for each language.

Chinese-Italian dialogue using a relay language 
(When it is not possible to find interpreters who speak all of the conference languages, a relay language is used, in other words, one of the conference languages which some interpreters will be listening to when they do not understand the speaker's language. Italian and Chinese authorities are meeting to discuss cooperation. Italian-Chinese interpreters are not available.)
In this case, your consultant interpreter will propose a team of two Chinese–English interpreters and two English–Italian interpreters. When Chinese is spoken, the Italian interpreters will listen to the English translation provided by the Chinese-English interpreters and then interpret that into Italian. English in this case is a relay language, used to facilitate interpretation between two other languages.

International institutions
At most international conferences interpretation is offered in the official languages of the organisation. The UN uses six official languages at its meetings: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.
The EU uses 24 official languages at some of its meetings; at others, it uses fewer active languages, with several in passive form. International federations and associations often have two or more official languages.

Session-specific languages
Not all sessions at a conference need the same languages. In the example above of an organisation with English, French, Spanish and German as official languages, for instance, the Budget Committee may have only German- and English-speaking members and there may be no need for its meetings to have French and Spanish.