|
UIA in Instanbul 
How do you recruit a team of professional interpreters in a country where you know neither the language nor how things work? Calliope member Danielle Gree talks of her experience organising the International Union of Architects congress in Istanbul in 2005 .
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My relationship with the UIA began at their congress in 1996 which brought 12,000 delegates and 70 interpreters to Barcelona. The subsequent congresses were held in Beijing and Berlin. In 2005 it was the turn of the dazzling city of Istanbul to host their mega-congress.
The local organisers decided from the outset that to attract as many local architects as possible they would provide English-Turkish interpretation in 15 rooms, in addition to the two plenary sessions that used the four official UIA languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian) plus Turkish. This presented me with a challenge as I had to find professional interpreters in a country in which the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) has few members (Turkish until now had not been a major international language).
Turkey is like a lot of countries where anyone can claim to be an interpreter, so a recruiter needs to tread carefully. This is where our network comes into its own in sourcing qualified interpreters. I talked to colleagues who’d previously recruited teams in Turkey and those who were studying Turkish and knew the local market, as well as contacted the local AIIC interpreters. I looked up Turkish interpreters on the Internet and soon came across a Turkish association of interpreters called BKTD and three other interpreter groups comprising experienced professionals. These interpreters took the same attitude to their work as Calliope: each group had strict entry criteria, a code of practice and a businesslike approach. Many of the local interpreters had already put out feelers to AIIC, and most have since joined the association.
My preparations began a good year before the congress. I went to Istanbul to meet the organising committee and confirmed their language requirements, did a site inspection and looked at the interpreting booths; I could draw on my experience of four previous UIA congresses to make some practical suggestions to the local organisers. To ensure to my own satisfaction that all interpreters were up to standard I asked each to provide a brief CV. As luck would have it the AIIC private market sector held a meeting in Istanbul in January 2005, and I was able to use the occasion to listen to several Turkish colleagues working. I spoke to my local contacts to check which of the Turkish interpreters had the required language combination, confirmed their areas of specialisation, their professional experience and who got on with whom - all important points if a team of 60 is to turn in a quality performance. Whilst all this was happening I contacted interpreters based in Europe with the other congress languages (French, Spanish and Russian) as they are scarce in Turkey.
The information from colleagues and my own research seemed to be pointing in the same direction so I was happy to start asking interpreters to pencil the dates in; as confirmation arrived from the organiser I wrote their contracts. I had to alter plans several times to take account of the many changes to the programme. Once the programme was confirmed the final requirement was for some 60 interpreters to cover the scheduled meetings (including the opening ceremony held in the open air in an old fortress). Forty of BKTD’s sixty members were recruited to work in the rooms with Turkish/English and about twenty interpreters from other European cities were contracted to cover the other congress languages. Hotel reservations and plane tickets had to be planned and approved for the non-locals .
For a congress of this size it was vital for me to be on the spot to deal with the logistics. I set myself up in Istanbul a week before the congress began so that I could prepare specialist glossaries and obtain the documents the interpreters needed for their preparation. I contacted all programme directors and commission secretaries within UIA asking them to send me their agendas and abstracts of the papers to be given. The UIA secretariat also provided the documents for the UIA general assembly. Furthermore, the organising committee gave me the abstracts of some of the scientific papers. This array of documents was classified and I uploaded it onto a web-based briefcase so that the interpreters could access it and download the documents they needed. We did suffer a little from the digital divide, but young colleagues were able to help their more senior colleagues sidestep the technology … by faxing the documents.
It is a tall order to coordinate a team of 60 interpreters throughout a congress, particularly in another country where you don’t understand either the language or how things are done. I therefore asked a Turkish colleague, Yaman Aksu, to help me manage the team, and it was of great benefit to have him act as liaison between the interpreters and the local organisers and explain to me why something had happened or why a person had reacted in a given way. He also gave me the local key to getting things done, thus preserving my sanity. Nothing beats local knowledge.
In fact the UIA congress was much like any other big event. At any major congress the same ground rules apply. We have to prepare the interpreters’ assignments well in advance and then change them the evening before because of late changes to the programme (a specialised software makes this task quicker and more accurate); it pays dividends to have a team leader in every room to liaise with the organisers. In all the rooms with interpretation we need a person responsible for documents who can obtain and photocopy the speakers’ scripts. We also make last minute changes to the interpreters’ assignments to cope with the unexpected: a colleague falling ill or unscheduled presenters speaking non-official languages, for example in Istanbul we covered Italian, Portuguese and Azeri at the last minute.
What conclusions can we draw from this adventure? That even in a distant country you can still put together quality teams of interpreters, provided you take the necessary precautions to ensure you get experienced, proficient and dependable professionals; you have to bring local knowledge into play and operate by the normal rules that apply to running any congress of this size. I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to our colleagues in Istanbul who proved themselves to be good colleagues with a professional approach to their work. So the small miracle occurred and Turkish became just another congress language and no obstacle for the delegates.
Danielle GREE
Calliope member in Spain
Back to Table of Content
|
