What we learned as Interpreters in 2022.

Dear Colleagues,

Now that 2022 ended and we finally got back some normalcy in our lives after the long confinement, it is time to assess what we learned during the past 12 months.  As interpreters we are constantly learning, and from talking to many of my colleagues, 2022 was better than the previous two years. It was a year of some change and many adjustments to a new professional lifestyle.

Last year was the year when we were boosted to continue the fight against Covid. Sadly, some of our colleagues, among them great interpreters, continued to leave the profession overwhelmed by technological changes, market uncertainty, and aggressive, ethically questionable practices by some language service providers.

2022 was the year when our profession finally settled in our new professional model of hybrid and in-person events with a constant and steady presence of distance interpreting assignments. It also became evident that remote interpreting from a hub will stick around as a popular choice in some parts of the world, but the home interpreting practice without colocation will reign supreme in many regions, especially where interpreters are scarce, technological infrastructure is poor, or market conditions have rejected the hub model. In the year that ends, most working interpreters became knowledgeable and technologically savvy, and incorporated technology to their continuing professional development permanently. Because learning and adapting is always good, these were the brightest highlights of the year.

Unfortunately, not everything was good. Change continued to bring along unfairness, abuse, and deception. The same changes that helped us adapt to the post-Covid world, provided the right circumstances to harm our profession.

As it has happened throughout history, today’s changes have brought a wave of bad practices that financially benefit some of those with the loudest voice while hurting conference interpreters and the users of their service. Some distance interpreting providers have ignored ethical and professional rules by welcoming inexperienced, unqualified individuals, often from other fields of interpreting, whose main credential is to provide interpreting services for a ridiculously low fee and to do it under very poor conditions. By recruiting these interpreters and diverting the clients’ attention to technology instead of service quality, the post-pandemic market continued to offer conference interpreting on-demand: interpreters on standby, willing to start an assignment with a couple of hours’ notice, without time to prepare, often working alone from their home thousands of miles away, and doing it during the night. Some unscrupulous providers continued to offer insulting fees paid by the minute or by the hour. It is now common practice to attend a professional conference and find remote interpreting platform representatives luring university students and recently graduated interpreters to work for the platform for free or for a scarce pay, with the excuse they are helping them by letting them “practice” with their platform. I have now seen this practice in three continents.

2022 continued to change the way we use professional social media. It still is a self-promoting infomercial by the big service providers where unsuspecting colleagues harm their image and reputation daily by bragging about working for these low-paying, ethically questionable, providers.

Going back to the positive, I congratulate those professional associations that held their conferences in-person or as hybrid events. This will be the new normal for professional conferences. A special mention to ITI for its spectacular conference in Brighton. This live event in the U.K. was my first in-person conference since 2019. OMT in Guadalajara, and NAJIT in Florida held big, high-quality conferences using creativity, technology, and thinking of their members’ health. FIT and ATA also gathered in big conferences in Varadero, Cuba, and Los Angeles respectively, and they welcomed colleagues from all over the world. My recognition also goes to all smaller associations with conferences in-person. Regardless of the conference you attended in 2022, they were all special, as they were filled with the human warmth that seeing, hugging, and talking to friends and colleagues after all this time generate. They will all be unforgettable.

Another wonderful gesture that showed professional solidarity was the decision by many professional associations and individual interpreters to volunteer their services to assist the people from Ukraine, both inside their country and abroad. Once again, interpreters showed their humanity and solidarity in the face of this terrible and unfair invasion of a peaceful nation. We proved to ourselves once again that interpreters are resilient, able to adapt to adversity to survive, and good humans.

We now face a year with less uncertainty, full of adjustments and plenty of changes and opportunities. Our resiliency, adaptability, courage, and recognizing that even after the worst days of the pandemic, many things have changed, but many others stayed the same. Let’s all focus on the good things to come while we guard against the bad ones. I wish you all a prosperous and healthy 2023!

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