Interested in languages? Think about conference interpreting

Conference interpreters are an elite group of professionals who can earn as much as a high-flying manager in business, and Macquarie University offers the largest conference interpreting program in the country.

Associate Lecturer Helen Slatyer’s most daunting experience as an interpreter at health conferences was with a surgeon who was operating on someone’s face. “You couldn’t not look, because you had to see what was going on to do the job,” she remembers.

Slatyer has been working regularly as a conference interpreter since the early 1990s. She sees it as a good balance to her lecturing work at the University.

“Health conferences tend to be very large, and about state-of-the-art research in specialisations,” she says. “You have to become an expert on the subject for about a week.”

Ideally, the interpreter sees papers and materials provided by organisers in advance, and becomes familiar with their content. Even at the best of times, you don’t have a profound understanding. But you do have the ability to talk about a subject. Having a good grasp of how research works is very helpful.

With good training and field experience, interpreters develop their own strategies on how to find, save and use the information and knowledge for a specific conference in a very short period of time, and then erase it from their memory to make way for the next assignment. This process is still being investigated in psychology and linguistics.

Slatyer finds that the use of PowerPoint presentations at most conferences has made her job much easier. “Constrained by that, speakers structure their thoughts in a certain way,” she says.

The Masters of Conference Interpreting

From the Postgraduate Diploma in Translation and Interpreting right through to Masters and double degrees, the University offers courses in theory and practice to equip not only future translators and interpreters but also those who want to advance their English language skills. This is the largest such program in Australia.

Getting into Macquarie University’s new Masters of Conference Interpreting program requires excellent proficiency in two languages, accreditation by the national standard-setting body, and a basic degree, not necessarily in a language. The course itself is rigorous and demanding. But the rewards are good, with well-paid jobs recognising the specialised nature of the work.

The program is offered in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Applicants must have completed either the Postgraduate Diploma in Translation and Interpreting, be accredited by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) or have an equivalent overseas qualification.

“For our first level courses, what we require is practical knowledge of the language,” says course convenor Dr Eddie Ronowicz. “People who have a degree in something other than a language bring more into the program. Very often they also specialise in literature.”

Half of all the translation work around the world is literary. There is a tough international standard for conference interpreters.

“It’s up to the students in the course to spend around three times as much time practising as they do in class. They will have already spent five or six years before that studying to become a translator of professional standard,” says Ronowicz. 

For more information about Macquarie’s translation and interpreting courses, see www.ling.mq.edu.au/postgraduate/coursework/tip.htm or email eddie.ronowicz@mq.edu.au

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