Interpreters at Work – a Peek into a Day (or two) at the European Parliament

The aim of our presentation will be to describe what it is like to interpret at the European Parliament (EP) and to present the main challenges faced by interpreters in their daily work at our institution as well as to reflect on how technology can assist interpreters in performing their duties. We will start by describing our work environment with a special focus on the underlying principle of multilingualism. We will then present different contexts in which our interpreters work and describe where and why interpreters encounter major difficulties in performing their task of communicating meaning (and not translating words). We will also describe what qualifications are necessary to perform the job at a quality required in a high-level setting such as the European Parliament. The second part of the presentation will be devoted to technological support that can be offered to conference interpreters. We will not dwell upon the classical man versus machine dilemma but rather focus on when and in which domains technologies could be potentially useful in increasing efficiency and helping maintain or even increase quality of the service rendered by human interpreters.