Rehashing the preparation issue

Reports on the growing needs for over the phone interpretation as one can read over Global WatchTower for instance are strategically avoiding to delve onto the service delivery from the standpoint of the interpreter. In a recent article, one learn that such service provider is paying a hefty $10 per hour for medical interpretation. You get a little more flipping patties at McDonalds in Tokyo these days. Nobody is laughing aloud. The slave-interpreters have no time to blog on the appalling conditions of the profession. I am lucky to be paid more, but pressures to ever more "systematize" the delivery for less quality are heavily felt these days. On the other side, that is, the interaction between the clients and me, they don't have a clue about what interpretation is. It's not in my case that there is no preparation time, it is that in most cases, there are not enough clues to fathom about what to prepare for and about. The most recent OPI session I did was 2 hours ago. I was notified yesterday. The subject was the name of a company. Period. Interpreters doing OPI are scorned by the raved in-the-booth interpreters for whom the books say that time and plenty of documentation are a requisite to deliver. Even a few of my friends who are the stealth pilots of the booth frown at me when I start talking about OPI, suggesting that only the fool and the B class interpreters do this. I am a B class interpreter, intrepid or call it fool at that, and I do OPI with a revenge. But for all their laughty manners and condescendence, they reckon with pride that they would never do it, or they tried sometime ago and "the sound was awful my dear!". Yeah, you bet! And I have been endlessly in the market for a dual headset phone. The OPI interpreter as I see it is the pilot getting ready for a flight with mostly no map, smeared windshield through which you can hardly spot the side lights of the track, altimeter broken and the smell of crude oil in the cabin. At times, it's raiders of the lost ark without the screen. I think your average OPI interpreters wants to deliver quality service, that goes against the pledge of "we put you in touch with a professional interpreter in 15 seconds". Heaven can wait. I am doing what should be called technical, industrial, specialized OPI. Nothing mundane, always specific, hardly the stuff you "naturally" know. On top of that, the subjects are but very seldom the same. One day it's about fish, the next day it's about meat. The common denominator indeed is food. But beyond that, go figures. And despite the fact that no preparation time is paid for, you have to prepare unless you are a D interpreter. Which comes down again to the matters of strategy, approaches at the most efficient ways if any to spend the least of time into a new subject in oder to scoop the most sensible, tangible and measurable big picture of a subject. The risk is that the talk will be about a fraction of it, and a deep one at that. It has happened more than once. OK, it's not that there is no map. One is common sense, but you have to wax that one daily in order to make it shine in stress circumstances. They don't teach you that I bet at interpretation schools. I refer to the issue at least once in the course I am teaching in Tokyo. I do a quick check of my student's competence at using the internet to do research. By far and large, they are mostly incompetent.

I show them to start with skimming wikipedia, then the news with Google News (98% they didn't know). I ask them what else they can dip into beyond text. No one knows. Then I tell them about video, Youtube or whatever. I didn't tell them about podcast but at times, but you are glad to find something audio on the subject you are researching (I was not confident pronouncing "neutraceutical", now I am). I didn't tell them about looking for glossaries. There are many these days, but the management of these is tricky. Preparation is a whole issue seemingly poorly covered in the literature.