Part 1 here.
The remaining 5 “commandments”:
6. Thou Shalt Not Kill (Thy Golden Goose)
7. Thou Shalt Not Steal (Clients)
8. Thou Shalt Bill Without Delay
9. Honor and Hone Thy Craft
10. Thou Shalt Find Thy Flow
The Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill (Thy Golden Goose)
In action, interpreters have some of the lowest overhead of any profession. A notebook and pen are the only essential items an interpreter needs to be successful at many gigs. Other than stocking up on notebooks and pens, some long term equipment to invest in is a reliable car for long-distance gigs, a decent laptop/desktop to take care of billing and administrative work on, a headset and webcam for remote video gigs, a cell phone, and travel gear for overnight jobs, including a multi-compartment backpack and a small enough suitcase to take as a carry-on if you need to fly.
In my few years of doing this job, I have observed that, while interpreting is not easy, and training to become an interpreter takes years, being a working interpreter can be easy-ish. At times. Some gigs are essentially A) check-in B) leave C) bill. I have not rigorously determined how often this happens, but it’s often enough to be a decent chuck of revenue, along with cancellations and postponements. This is balanced by the other kind of gig, which lasts 6+ hours and leaves you feeling like your head is scrambled from the amount of interpreting you’ve just done. So on average, it’s likely to track the usual Pareto principle that 20% of the gigs make up 80% of the actual work.1
It’s a little like the anecdote of the plumber who may only tighten one screw in your house, but charges for the expertise of knowing which screw needs it. The interpreter has studied for thousands of hours in order to know what is or isn’t needed right then.
So this commandment basically means: it’s OK to feel lucky doing a job that you are suited for. Keep that in mind if it’s your career and not just your job. Chris Rock can explain (includes explicit language).
The Seventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Steal (Clients)
When an interpreter is hired for a gig, one of the documents they usually sign with the agency hiring them is an agreement not to poach clients. This is mainly because the agency has already done the work of procuring that end client that the interpreting work is needed for, among other administrative work and marketing, and they don’t want to have that work go to waste by being undercut in pricing from an interpreter who could themselves make more money while saving the client money by charging them directly. This is fairly standard in many professions.
Having gotten much more work from language agencies than from direct clients so far in my career, it would be foolish to not honor these agreements. Agencies vary from great to terrible, but they provide most of the stability that an early-career interpreter needs to get off the ground.
The direct clients that are easiest to find are the courts, but the trade-off is that they are far from the most lucrative. For a better breakdown of working with both agency and direct clients, I recommend reading from Corinne McKay’s excellent How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.
The Eighth Commandment: Thou Shalt Bill Without Delay
This commandment is dedicated to the few. The music makers and dreamers of dreams. The ones who build and birth each era of the world. And thus don’t always have the patience to bill and bill and bill again. Until the bill is in the bank.
To interpret for a living, you have to bill. You may not love it, but you can’t avoid it. Plus, most of the companies hiring you will prefer that you bill quickly; some might even demand it. In Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, he writes that one of Johnson’s rules was everything must be replied to on the same day it is received. Nowhere – except in accepting the jobs themselves – is this as important in being a professional interpreter as it is in billing.
The Ninth Commandment: Honor and Hone Thy Craft
The craft of interpreting is thousands of years old. Interpreters, or at least acts of interpreting, appear at several precarious points in world history. Moreover, translation – an adjacent, often overlapping field – could be argued is the most important profession in history, given our present access to ancient texts and their origin stories is owed to in part to translators.
More often, interpreting and interpreters have a low-to-middling status as secondary players to the main event: court, conference, etc. Modern day interpreting has begun to codify its craft into professional work standards in the hopes of raising its status while establishing some common standards.
Real-life situations often require interpreters to remind others why the interpreter is there, or to push back against something that would be unbecoming or even unethical for interpreter to do. It is a long running goal of working interpreters to get their profession to be perceived as white-collar, similar to accounting or analysis.
As part of the above effort, professional interpreters continue their education credentialing programs in conference, legal, medical, and educational interpreting. Some of these efforts are further along than others. Having completed many continuing education programs in the past few years, the quality inevitably varies, but there are good courses, lectures, seminars, and conferences out there for early- and mid-career interpreters looking to improve their craft. (See the courses by the De La Mora Institute of Interpretation or the University of Arizona’s National Center for Interpretation) Of course, the best improvement comes from repetition and measurement: all that’s needed is an audio recorder and practicing at home on TV/Youtube, listening back, and trying again.
The Tenth Commandment: Thou Shalt Find Thy Flow
Interpreting is exhilarating when done even moderately successfully. Interpreting done right grants a kind of flow to the interpreter. This is similar to getting in the zone, being engrossed and focused, or finding a groove. Some of my best experiences interpreting I can barely remember the contents of.
How to find flow depends more on your own preferences and habits than any one specific hack. Some things that work for me: steady breathing, familiar set-up (notebook, pen; desk if I’m working remotely), economical notetaking, and building up a mental pattern of the speakers’ speech tendencies. But feel free to try your own.
- I don’t think I’m revealing anything that other interpreters, language providers and other language professionals (or their spouses or partners) don’t already know. This job can seem well-paying for not a lot of work (and pay rates are increasing in at least a few states hoping to attract new interpreters). This is partly because the work of being an interpreter is front-loaded in that interpreters have to spend years to learn, practice, and improve their language skills, before starting training to become an interpreter. As interpreters are fond of saying, being bilingual is not an automatic ticket to interpreting. I would agree but add that an ambitious and curious person can learn a lot of the interpreting skills on-the-job, if you have already acquired comfortable fluency in your language and in English. ↩︎
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