Regulators of interpretation and associations of translators/interpreters

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 533.

There are many regulators of interpreting activities throughout the world, such as AIIC (L'Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence; The International Association of Conference Interpreters, based in Europe: http://www.aiic.net. See AIIC Statutes in Annex 1), TAALS (The American Association of Language Specialists: http://www.taals.net/), ATA (American Translators Association: http://www.atanet.org/), EST (European Society for Translation Studies: http://www.est.utu.fi/), FIT (Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs, International Federation of Translators, based in Canada: http://www.fit-ift.org), Асоціація перекладачів України: http://www.uta.org.ua, Союз переводчиков России: http://www.translators-union.ru/, Ассоциация переводчиков и педагогов: http://www.shmel.com/index.php, etc. However, the most influential regulators are: AIIC in Europe, TAALS, ATA in the USA and FIT in Canada.

European interpreters and interpretation companies have to comply with the rules and regulations set up by the International Association of Conference Interpreters – AIIC (see more about AIIC in Annex 1).

You may already have seen or heard interpreters at work whispering for politicians and members of delegations or interpreting in soundproof booths at large international conferences.

The ability to interpret is a skill many claim but few truly possess. Consider the process of interpreting: the interpreter listens to the speaker, understands the message and converts it into another language, speaks to the delegates and all the time monitors his output to ensure elegant delivery. And while this is happening the interpreter is processing the next part of the speech.

What are the processes involved here? It is essential to grasp that interpreting is first and foremost perceiving and understanding the intended message perfectly. It can then be "detached" from the words used to convey it in the source language and reconstituted (transformed), in all its subtlety, in the words of the target language.

Interpreting is a constant “to-ing” and “fro-ing” between different ways of thinking and cultural environments. Conference interpreters usually work in a team put together for a specific conference according to the event's working languages. Today, interpreters spend most of their time performing simultaneous interpretation. For smaller meetings, where only two or at most three languages are used, consecutive interpretation is also suitable. The majority of professional conference interpreters now have more than two working languages – on average; AIIC interpreters have three or four. But they do not work into all of them indiscriminately. AIIC has defined a strict language classification scheme to ensure quality, which is called the “language combination” [How we work http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page1403.htm ].