As this booklet is intended for both practising conference interpreters and beginners, experienced colleagues will find many statements of the obvious, while newcomers to the profession may not always understand the reasons behind some of the suggestions.

Many interpreters, indeed some delegates, have contributed to the bouquets and brickbats from which this sort vademecum has been distilled.

Although our prime concern is with quality, that elusive something which is recognised by everyone but which nobody knows how to define, experience has amply demonstrate that breaches of simple rules can adversely affect not only the image that delegates have of interpreters but also the image that interpreters have of one another.

At a time when consecutive is becoming rarer, when the number of working languages is increasing rapidly, when an impersonal machine assigns an interpreter to a meeting on tin in the morning and one on dairy products in the afternoon, leaving no time for adequate preparation, when newly fledge (and sometimes decidedly underfledge) colleagues are being hastily drafted in to fill ever more booths, there is a pressing need to maintain quality and standards, to motivate newcomers to do so and generally to recognise that the profession’s reputation for quality rests on the sum of our individual efforts to secure it.

Although an attempt has been made in what follows to proceed in logical order, real life is rarely logical and things may turn out very differently.

I. CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS
Offers of work may come from intergovernmental organisations, private bodies or firms, from professional conference organisers, ad hoc organisers or from colleagues.

When the offer comes from an intergovernmental organisation, the conditions of work and remuneration will almost certainly be in conformity with existing agreement or accepted practice. If in doubt, check with colleagues who work for such bodies. Agreements laying down conditions of employment and remuneration have been signed inter alia between AIIC and the UN family, the European Communities and the European Coordinated Organisations. They are reviewed every five years.

If the recruiter is a private organisation or firm, it may not be familiar with existing practice or professional requirements and tactful guidance may be necessary. If you have not been in the profession long enough to know how to respond, consult a more experienced colleague.

Professional conference organisers, if not interpreters themselves, may not always wish fully to apply internationally accepted professional standards, although many have learnt from experience that this can lead to unsatisfactory interpretation.

Most colleagues involved in recruiting interpreters will have either been your teachers in interpreters’ school or will have the same language combination as you. Any AIIC member may and can recruit.

Wherever the offer comes from, it is your responsibility to be aware of the terms and conditions of employment in the profession and to ensure that they are observed. Colleagues will explain if the intricacies of team strengths, language combinations, per noctems, etc. defeat you.

Read your contract before you sign it and always keep sour engagements’ book up date. Reply promptly to letters and offers of work. If you publish a telephone number make sure that somebody is usually there to answer and knows your availability, or invest in an answering machine and check it daily.

Open envelopes containing documents immediately, even if you do not need to study them until much later. Contracts, programmes or details of changes of venue may be hidden among a pile of conference papers and organisers are justifiably irritated when phoned for information that has already been sent out.

Once you have signed a contract, do not try to get out of it because someone has offered you something more attractive. If you need to be replaced, find out if a suitable colleague is free on the date(s) concerned, without further details at that stage, then approach the person who recruited you to see if the colleague you propose is acceptable. The person who recruited the team will have taken care to ensure that it is balanced linguistically and otherwise and will not be pleased if you disturb that balance. Remember that your reputation for reliability will suffer if you ask to be replaced.

II. PREPARING FOR A MEETING
It is a good idea to have a system to keep track of documents (past or current) relating to a particular subject or organisation. Unless you have a photographic memory (and even that can become clouded with time and overloaded) adopt a method for indexing key words, including the titles of officials and committees, with their translation into each of your working languages, so that you can retrieve them easily when needed. The better your mastery of the organisation’s structure and jargon, the more likely you are to be recruited again. Interpreters, even freelances, should identify with the “corporate image” of the organisation they are working for and seek to fit in with it.

If the organisers have taken the troubles to send you documents, study them, in all your working languages. You will find that minutes of past meetings or the proceedings of earlier congresses are the most useful but don’t hesitate also to use Encyclopaedias and basis text books for beginners. An interpreter needs to have as good a knowledge of the terrain as an `infantry-man` before going into the battle. Prepare your own multilingual glossary for the meeting. Note the terms specific to that particular group or topic, a Management Committee in one context may be Steering Group in another. Be prepared to share your glossaries with the other members of the team. Never be a terminology “freeloader”, relying on others to do the work.

In compiling glossaries, whether on a computer or manually, make sure that you have a logical system for sorting terms (e.g. by subject, organisation, committee, etc.) in alphabetic order for each language and which enables you to identify terms with the organisation that uses them in that particular way. If you decide to buy a computer, consult the AIIC computer working group (GRIP) on proven software and hardware.

Briefings, even very short ones before a session, can be a valuable addition to your preparation for a difficult technical meeting. They can also enhance the professional image of the interpreter. A well organised briefing, i. e. one attended by experts, preferably covering the working languages of the conference, and the interpreters, who have studied the conference papers and relevant textbooks in advance, can greatly improve interpretation performance. Experts usually appreciate informed questions and in the course of explaining the significance of a term, a process, etc. they develop a much better understanding of interpreters’ needs and much greater confidence in the interpreters’ ability to do the job satisfactorily.

III. TEAMWORK IN THE BOOTH
The only people who must be on time for a meeting are the interpreters. A group of delegates may habitually arrive late, but the day you do, you may find that they arrived on time and are waiting for you. Interpreters should be there 15 minutes before the scheduled starting time, to check whether any new documents have been circulated or ad hoc working groups convened, etc.

Working arrangements with colleagues should be based on a clear understanding of who does what when. Arrangements must take account of the needs of all the booths, overall language cover, working conditions, difficulty of the subject, etc. Slavish adherence to the clock or to dividing the work rigidly on the basis of the number of papers to be presented may serve neither your interests nor those of the delegates. For example, i

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