How to define “conference interpreting”

We will be celebrating AIIC’s 70^th anniversary in July. Earlier this year, we celebrated the German VKD’s 20^th anniversary in Berlin, where I handed over the responsibility of chairing the VKD admissions committee. Both occasions as well as many inspiring conversations I have had recently left me musing about a somewhat fundamental question about our profession: What is conference interpreting after all? Or rather: What isn’t? What defines “conference interpreting” and distinguishes it from other forms of interpreting?

I suppose that our areas of activity have diversified a lot since the post-war era, and that the lines have become increasingly blurry, what with sign language interpreting, simultaneous court interpreting, written interpreting, video-conferences etc. Especially when dealing with the proof of a certain number of days worked required to be admitted into our professional associations, it is important to know where to draw the line, and I found this increasingly difficult recently.

For all these reasons, I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts and get to know your points of view on the following questions:

• Which criteria define conference interpreting?
• Which novel/neighbouring/unusual forms of interpreting would you (not) include in the concept, and why?

I order to make sure I get things right, I looked up AIIC’s and ISO’s definitions first:

Here is what AIIC says:

Conference interpreters translate a spoken message from one language to another in a formal setting.

Conference interpreters translate spoken language in real time. [A thorough knowledge of languages, nerves of steel, attention to detail and boundless curiosity are the hallmarks of the professional interpreter.] Interpreters work at every kind of meeting and in any venue. They work for the major international organisations and for business clients.

Furthermore, the Buenos Aires Assembly, in 2012, resolved that AIIC recognises sign languages as fully-fledged conference languages and accepts them for the purposes of membership and language classification.

And here comes the ISO 23155 definition:

3.2.10 conference interpreting

interpreting (3.2.6) used for multilingual communication at technical, political, scientific and other formal meetings

3.2.6 interpreting/interpretation

rendering spoken or signed information from a source language (3.1.4) to a target language (3.1.5) in oral or signed form, conveying both the meaning and language register (3.1.10) of the source language content (3.1.15)

And ISO 20108:2017(en) — Simultaneous interpreting — Quality and transmission of sound and image input — Requirements:

3.2 – simultaneous interpreting

mode of interpreting (3.1) performed while a speaker is still speaking or signing

Note 1 to entry: For the purposes of this document, the activity requires specialized equipment.

From these definitions, the following features could be derived to check different forms of interpreting against:

Important to know: while oral and written communication “only” differ in medium and style, sign language is considered a language of its own. This means that interpreting from one sign language to another (or between a sign and a spoken language) is considered interpreting, while transcribing or respeaking a spoken text is just a transfer between different media, but not between languages, thus no interpreting. In this sense, written interpreting, or even real-time translation of e.g. a chat from one language to another would not count as interpreting, while I think it somehow requires similar skills.

All in all I must say that I am not completely convinced of this classification scheme.  I would say that not all types of interpreting require the same level of skills and/or don’t deliver the same quality. For example, whispered interpreting, due to the acoustic constraints, does not allow for the same quality as simultaneous interpreting using adequate equipment (also defined in an ISO norm). And liaison, diplomatic, or court interpreting, in some instances, do not require the mnemonic and note-taking skills consecutive interpreting does.

While none of the variations of interpreting is better than the other, I think that the high-standard skills of the “classical” interpreting modes, simultaneous and consecutive, are transferable to other forms, like whispered, diplomatic, or court interpreting. However, this wouldn’t necessarily work the other way around. And, by the way, to my mind, the skills of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting are not automatically transferable between each other either.

If I had to find a common denominator to simultaneous and consecutive interpreting, “non-intrusiveness” is what comes to my mind. Both simultaneous and consecutive interpreting give the speaker the highest possible degree of freedom – simultaneous if the situation allows for proper simultaneous interpreting equipment, consecutive if it doesn’t. Once you master the two high-standard techniques, you can use them in all kinds of non-conference settings, no matter what are the requirements in terms of non-intrusiveness and quality.

In the end, maybe nowadays what makes the difference is not the (conference) setting, but rather the level of skill and quality. However, the term “conference interpreting” is probably bound to stay as a tribute to the genesis of our profession.

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Now, while these are my personal thoughts on the subject, I would be very interested to know what other members of the profession think. What would you include, what are the defining features, where are the differences, and … does it matter at all?

About the author

Anja Rütten is a freelance conference interpreter for German (A), Spanish (B), English (C), and French (C) based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has specialised in knowledge management since the mid-1990s. She is a full member of AIIC, an accredited freelance interpreter with the EU institutions and the European Patent Office, and has vast experience as a university lecturer.