A day at a congress, seen from the booth
The audience sees a speaker and hears their own language. Here is what happens on the other side of the glass.
For the audience, a congress with interpretation is quietly unremarkable: you pick up a receiver, choose a channel and listen. That is the point. Behind the glass, the day has a shape of its own.
Before the room fills
Interpreters arrive well before the first session. The booth is checked, the consoles are tested with the sound engineer, and the relay between booths is confirmed, so that a question asked in Portuguese can reach an English-speaking panel through the Spanish floor without anyone noticing the detour.
We also use that hour for the last pass over the program: names, job titles, the acronyms a sector uses without explaining them, and the two or three slides that arrived overnight.
During the sessions
Interpreters work in pairs and change over roughly every half hour. The one who is not speaking is not resting: they write down figures, look up a term, find the slide the speaker has skipped to, and keep an eye on the clock for the handover.
The hardest moments are rarely the technical ones. They are the jokes, the questions shouted from the floor without a microphone, and the panel where three people talk at once.
After the applause
Glossaries are updated while the day is fresh, and anything that caused trouble is noted for the next edition of the event. A congress that runs again next year starts, for us, the moment this one ends.