My first interpreter job

Not mine. His. I am pasting here an incredible ingenuous message that came in some professional network BBS.

"Hello all. I will be performing my first job as an interpreter next
week. Any help from the veterans would be greatly appreciated. Also,
research methods (I.e. The company's product, etc.) or specific
language reference books/methods would be appreciated. Also, does
anyone know a good business jgo, keigo reference?"

Everything sounds wrong here, including the gentleman's web site, the pretense you can read there to be a pro. No link out of politeness. Everyone pretenses something at some times, especially early time. You have to start from somewhere and stop the spanking of "please forgive me but I am virgin at all this".

My first assignment while still a university student came through a teacher. It was not interpretation. It was eavesdropping mission. Listening and reporting. A spy in a sense. I was definitely and for good reasons unsure about my competence of "mere listening". To what the teacher snapped back : "You will always be better than your boss." She proved in the long time to be wrong as nowadays,  speaking Japanese to whatever extend is nothing miraculous.

But back to the kid. I can hear the guffaws, laughter and sneers of the readers. They will not seriously answer. What with the fact that when it comes to interpretation, with Japanese in the picture but is it limited to that language?, don't count on anything from the big boys - and a majority of big girls.

I am missing the meaning of jgo but you won't make anything about keigo, honorific language, in a week so forget about it. Or rather, start doing it with any manual for foreign learners. There are not so much to choose among. I will suggest this rather old one, and cheap at that, How to be polite in Japanese, because it is a good book, and because the authors are part of my nostalgia 30 years ago in Nagoya university.

But you will find keigo outside the books aplenty.

That's why the second thing is to quit chew the fat with people of your own age, especially Japanese (keep the girls though), because you will learn nothing of use from them when doing business interpretation. They don't know about keigo. Put a necktie and start getting chummy with some oldies, 60 years old at least being the best generation. A CEO or top brass is the best. Learn how to look and sound older than you are, because except for show business or prostitution, being young in Asia is not a professional advantage.

You will learn keigo by listening first. Also listen as I do to any recordings of IR and corporate presentations because these are chocked full with stiff upper lip no sexy at all but plain daily keigo as if you were working in a Japanese company. On top of this, the speakers are CEOs so you can't get better examples for free of corporate public discourse. That's the basic level of language you will need in business interpretation.

Also, keigo is just the language part of a set of rules of interaction between grown-ups. It implies way much more than language. Body language, facial expression, movements, cloth are all part of keigo. The keigo books won't tell you about this though.

To put keigo into perspective, the earlier the better, you may consider reading or at least getting aware that keigo refers to etiquette, which is a global feature of countries on this planet. There is even an an etiquette for dummies. 

Research methods? I wrote about it already. The web of course, starting with the corporate site, and within these sites, the page that gives an overview of the company. It should be considered the top page, rather than the official top page full of PR jargon and vaporware. Keep the PR jargon for the second stage.

News sources : what's the talk of the town about these corporations? Where do they stand in their respective industry ecosystem? Look for video, audio recordings, podcasts about them or about the industry at large. Don't count much to find something in Japanese though, or call it a miracle if you do. 

Get as much feedback from the client, and if possible, from the other side. Get advanced copies of ppt and any other documents. Ask the question : "What do you want to achieve out of this meeting?" The answers usually bring gold in the understanding of what may pop up. Get the names and positions of people on both sides so you can, especially for the Japanese side, guess who will be speaking most of the time. It may not be the top brass. More than often, sorry for the ladies, but they don't count besides smiling.

And remember your job is about to allow communication to flow. Your opinion doesn't matter.