News & Articles

Organising interpretation for large conferences
by Jean-Pierre Allain

Consultant interpreters face a particular challenge when called upon to provide several teams of interpreters for a large conference. CIAP was selected twice this year for such large events, first for the XIII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and then for the Third World Water Forum.

Putting together a team of interpreters for any meeting can be tricky; it involves finding the right interpreters with the requisite language combination for the particular meeting while ensuring that older and more experienced interpreters share a booth with younger ones. Finding the interpreters who fit these criteria as well as the additional requirements of the NAM summit and the World Water Forum involved many weeks of work, communicating by email and phone with numerous interpreters, responding to many questions, searching for flight connections, negotiating airfares and fees for work. On average, three interpreters were contacted for each interpreter recruited. And even then, one always needs to provide for back-up arrangements in case a recruited interpreter drops out because of a last-minute emergency.

Delegates listening to James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank,
Shanghai Conference on Poverty Reduction, 2004

XIII NAM Summit

For the XIII NAM Summit, which was held from February 20 to 25 in Kuala Lumpur, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Malaysia chose CIAP to provide all language services.This meant providing a total of 46 translators and interpreters for English, French, Spanish and Arabic. They were recruited from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and USA. All the interpreters were members of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (aiic) and all of them were required to have at least ten years’ experience in large international conferences and, particularly, at previous NAM conferences.

A summit is a gathering of heads of state or government and requires extra careful preparation, particularly in view of the protocol that must be adhered to. Summits are usually preceded by meetings of ministers and senior government officials who, in a sense, do the footwork for the heads of state or government. NAM conferences traditionally cover a very wide agenda and meetings often go on late into the night, since the senior officials and ministers must reach agreement on all the points of the agenda before the heads of state or government arrive for their two-day summit. The timetable of meetings is therefore unpredictable. The chief interpreter and the assistant coordinator must have the ability to provide teams of interpreters for a variety of breakout sessions at very short notice. Often, a request will come in: “We need English, Spanish and Arabic in Room A in 30 minutes” and immediately interpreters must be selected from the pool of interpreters on standby or from other meeting rooms, while ensuring a balanced workload for the interpreters to avoid ending up with some having worked many hours while others have worked far less.

CIAP handled all the contacts with the Malaysian Government, the host, as well as with the interpreters and translators, arranging their travel to and from Malaysia, their hotel accommodation, their contracts, their payments. In addition, there were post-conference translations of many pages of statements and declarations to organise, review and deliver on time.

CIAP associates meet wih Mr. Makoto Jingu, Coordinator
of Language Services at the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto.

The Third World Water Forum

The 24,000 participants who gathered in Kyoto, Osaka and Shiga, Japan, made the 3rd World Water Forum an even larger event than the NAM Summit, although not all the meetings had simultaneous interpretation.

A team of 50 interpreters was recruited from all over the world, to cover simultaneous interpretation into English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. In addition, there were about 150 Japanese interpreters hired by the Secretariat to provide simultaneous interpretation in Japanese and English at most of the meetings.

Here, the biggest challenge was coordination, since most of the meetings were organised by different agencies or organisations. The Secretariat of the conference had a hard time ascertaining in a timely manner which meetings needed interpretation and into which languages. To know what languages were needed meant finding out who the participants would be. The CIAP coordinator needed to provide bilingual booths for meetings using only French and English, Spanish and English or only Japanese and English at very short notice.

In large conferences where many organisations hold their own sessions, it is not easy for the Secretariat to have a clear overview of all that’s going on and know well in advance what interpretation services will be needed where and at what time. Meeting schedules often change at the last moment to accommodate speakers or chairpersons who may be busy at other gatherings at the same conference. It is best to have clear agreed guidelines known to all involved, well before the conference starts, on how the simultaneous interpreter pool operates and which meetings can qualify to receive simultaneous interpretation.

The many late requests for interpreters or last-minute changes kept the coordinator and assistant coordinator busy updating interpretation schedules and making sure that the interpreters assigned knew when and where they were required. The interpreters’ lounge was of crucial importance, being the place where interpreters could always find the latest update of assignments, as well as the coordinator and assistant coordinator, when they were not running around to meeting rooms to check or in meeting with the Secretariat.

Luigi Luccarelli and James Feng, two senior interpreters
at the 3rd World Water Forum

This time too CIAP did all the searching, followed by negotiating with the interpreters, hiring their services, arranging airfares and hotel accommodation, paying out daily subsistence allowances and fees as well as reimbursing airfares after the conference. This, of course, involves having the necessary secretarial and accounting facilities.

CIAP is incorporated in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia and can provide all these services, in addition to written translation of conference documents.

Takaragaike Lake as seen from the Kyoto International Convention Hall