Tell your needs in details to your trustful interpreter

Purposes, aims, ambitions, expectations, call it whatever you want. The point is that I always ask clients about their intentions, what they want to yield out of the coming meetings and visits, what they want to take home.

"We are a service provider in the domain of such and such. We need an interpreter tomorrow in Tokyo for a one hour discussion with our local partners." You may think the meeting's subject will be about such and such domain, so you quickly start focusing on such and such, get wet as fast and efficiently as you can to understand the big picture and more, and provide adequate services. Your client may have sent you some documents, or pointed at their web site, and that of the local partner. They may have added a few remarks like "We want to catch up after Mar. 11.". And that's it. You didn't ask, or they didn't tell you, but the agenda of the meeting has mostly nothing to do with the domain named "such and such". You discover right before the meeting that a much bigger issue is at stake, that the representative director, or agent, or "our man in Tokyo" actually left following Mar.11. They are here to mend the fences, to apology, to explain, to sooth the ire, the malaise, whatever. The subject has indeed nothing to do with "such and such" but with trust recovery, rapport and equilibrium reclaiming. They thought all interpreters are equal and communication is nothing but a matter of transporting words between two different dimensions. After all, isn't it the unique role of the interpreter? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Brief your interpreter on human and emotional issues at stake rather than let her discover what's wrong on the spot