The accidental interpreter

The best career track for business interpreting is to spend some years as a staff interpreter. I spent 6 months in a corporation as staff interpreter, freshly graduated from university, without any training in interpretation but a single course where sight translation was the painful single dish to be gulped down. There was no career track. It just happened. Some famous manufacturer was newly bought out by a Japanese blue chip. Engineers and technicians came from Japan to live with families in the North part of France. They needed to communicate on a daily basis, at all level of professional and non-professional life. Japanese was still a rare currency in the market. They would hire anyone with whatever level. I was an anyone. Hardly competent but definitely feeling that the job suited me very well. And the pay, for a freshly graduate was very high. It was "Japan as Number one" time. Six months is nothing, especially when awareness is absent. I could have spent a few years there if not for military service, and forcibly learn a lot about business and corporation dynamics by being soaked in it.  Only, circumstances made things turn differently.

I have yet to see the articles of that conference that took place in Trieste - was it last year already - about liaison interpreting in business. I don't know whether the thought about curriculum development goes anywhere beyond the recommendations found in an Australian book in the chapter "Business Interpreting" tucked inside the broader category of "Community Interpreting" : read a lot of business related newspapers and magazines, with examples of titles added. Even the holy scripture - "Liaison Interpreting - A handbook" - is mostly mute about the strategies to apply to grow and why. Among my current students, some are seriously thinking about launching into business interpreting. They have no corporate life experience. With French as B language. chances they find a position as staff interpreter even in a French subsidiary in Japan is nil. Business material is everywhere, in multiple media form. Reading material is but a single version about business expression. There are real conference recordings (not in French), real business people interviews. There is of course and without surprise a lack of negotiation settings to be watched and listened to. Negotiations are off record. There is no guidance though besides the obvious suggestion to regularly "read" a lot. Someone I can't remember about wrote in the academia about patterns in medical interpreting. Patterns in business interpreting must be delineated, listed up and described from the point of view of participants' dynamics and the role of the interpreter within each of these. Some can be recreated at school granted there were a school dedicated to business interpreting. But the vast majority of people interpreting in business settings happen to do so out of circumstances they hardly master nor understand. Practice makes perfect but the lack of practice because of the lack of constant assignments doesn't help. Alternative self-training approaches for the "accidental interpreter" could be enunciated in depth granted the veterans give a helping hand. In many situations, learning is receiving articulate, meaningful,  strong, deep tips, that are not drops of wisdom but tracks toward professionalism. Listing titles of newspapers and magazines to be read daily is too feeble an advice to turn the accidental into a purposeful interpreter.