Over the years I have seen developments in interpreting come and go, and there has always been the latest threat lurking around the corner. Blend our love of being the bearers of bad tidings with the underlying insecurity of the self-employed and you have fertile ground for spreading doom and gloom.
The arrival of remote interpreting has been likened to the arrival of simultaneous many years ago, meaning that our markets and working conditions will change permanently and many of our cherished ideas are open to question.
Interpreters have always declared a professional domicile as a reference point for calculating travel costs and subsistence allowance, and usually it has been the place where the interpreter lived. This made perfect sense when we travelled to where meetings were held, but the notion of professional domicile seems immaterial in times of remote interpreting where we may work from home or from a local hub.
In the past we could explain to clients that some interpreters had to travel to the venue from elsewhere, which would involve additional cost. Now the interpreters work from their home base – they might be in their own home, working from a hub or working alongside a colleague in a hub or home set-up – but travelling has been removed from the equation. Picture a meeting that is held in Geneva or London or Mexico City with a few people in attendance. The interpreters are all working from home or a local hub, and most of the delegates are in their home base. None of the interpreters must travel, so their domicile cannot be used to establish overall fee, and even if you think it should you will be unlikely to convince your client. Once people don’t travel the reason for professional domicile disappears.
Clients can accept justified costs, but they are going to question expenses that we cannot explain. It is important to see things from the client’s angle – something we have not always been very good at – and in difficult times to meet them halfway. It is also important for us to shape what we can of the future, not dig our heels in to defend a working condition we are hard pressed to justify.
Professional domicile has not been iron-clad in the past. Colleagues would declare one place as their domicile (say Brussels) and live elsewhere (take your pick). Domicile and place of residence have not always been the same thing.
It’s important to take a broad view when looking at the changes wrought by remote interpreting. Because costs have come down clients are organising more meetings, and attendance is increasing because participants simply need to sign in – no travel is involved. In the face-to-face past a trade union meeting in Geneva would attract two or three Argentinians and a Brazilian from Latin America; now that same meeting when held remotely has 30 participants from Argentina, 40 from Brazil as well as delegates who previously were unable to travel to meetings – Colombia for example, southeast Asia, Oceania. There is now regular demand for Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Thai, Nepali, Vietnamese and Cambodian. RSI has meant that teams can include colleagues from around the world, such as Canada, Singapore, Australia – the only limiting factor is the time zone.
People have said that remote interpreting is not what they signed up for. This may be a way to let off some emotional steam, but it seems unlikely to save existing markets because those who use our services live in the here and now. Our clients can now choose interpreters from anywhere in the world and will certainly find people who are willing to work remotely. Once a client is lost there is scant chance of their coming back.
These idle thoughts apply to the private market. The international organisations have taken the sensible decision to operate as hubs with the interpreters on site, any other solution would probably be unworkable. Clearly any departure from current arrangements would be subject to negotiation, but we might be well advised to have some ideas at the ready just in case.
None of us quite know where the current changes to the profession will take us, but I tend to be relatively upbeat about how the profession will develop because I think RSI will open new or expand existing markets providing the service offered is technically reliable. I may be wrong, but then so might anyone else willing to predict where we will be five years hence.
We need to grasp the future, not hanker after the past.
Phil SMITH, AIIC Switzerland.
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Dear Phil: wonderful article. Congratulations! and Thanks! I just have one question: why do you write "any other solution would probably be unworkable" for international organizations?
Big hug!
Etienne
P.S. Do you have a Spanish version of this article? Otherwise I’d gladly translate it myself.
Please feel free to translate the article into Spanish. The international organisations run many meetings a day and the interpreters work within the premises, it’s really a hub. It is already quite a tall order, and adding the complication of every interpreter being somewhere else would make the whole system very hard to run, if not unworkable. That’s why I think the organisations have made a wise decision.
I agree that the concept of domicile is rendered largely obsolete when we’re talking about pure RSI. I also welcome the fact that RSI has made it possible to enlarge the language regime beyond anything we/ our clients could have conceived of pre-Covid.
However, there will always be team constellations when interpreters will be working from a hub (you write "local hubs" but these are by no means common in all the markets we live in) and so will have to physically get themselves to that hub, which will involve some travel. Also, in-person meetings will come back at some point – in fact in many markets they never fully went away. For these two settings at least, the concept of domicile as a point of reference for calculating travel costs (and sensible/feasible team composition) will remain a necessity. There are more reasons for maintaining domicile as a "thing" but this immediately sprang to mind for me.
I have to admit I had not thought when writing about hubs that are far from home, and of course domicile would remain as to calculate costs. By the same token domicile will stay for meetings that are held face to face for which the interpreters must travel. There are many permutations and our working conditions should cover them all. The idea behind the article was to get people thinking, not a single rule that covers all eventualities.
Couldn’t agree more, Karin.
As far as the professional domicile is concerned, the situation seems logical to me: the professional domicile no longer applies in a pure RSI setting where interpreters work from their home, their office or a local hub. But when interpreters have to travel to a physical venue or a hub (both for International Organizations and the private market), the professional domicile will continue to apply just like before.
Many thanks and congratulations for this, Lourdes, Phil and Peter – very thought-provoking and extremely timely!
To add my two pennies’ worth, here is a slightly amended version of a message I sent several weeks ago to a number of colleagues, including ExCo:
I am taking the opportunity to write concerning a matter on which I feel it is essential that AIIC adopt a stance, for its own sake and that of large numbers of our colleagues – members, precandidates and non-members alike. I am referring to the concept of professional address/domicile/residence in virtual interpreting markets, and all that goes hand-in-hand with it, given that Distance Interpreting is without a doubt here to stay.
The Coronavirus pandemic and its repercussions, short- and long-term, represent probably the greatest upheaval and state-change our profession has known since the advent of simultaneous interpretation. The conditions in which interpreters worldwide are now working present a huge number of technical, cognitive, physical and normative challenges, and in that particular field it is fair to say that AIIC has more than stepped up to the plate with excellent contributions and advice from the THC, the TFDI etc.
However, as regards the huge and delicate topic I refer to in my opening paragraph, AIIC is perceived as remaining pretty much voiceless, and I am keen to alert you to the pressing dangers of this situation, both to our Association and our currently often rudderless colleagues.
As a trainer and teacher of conference interpreting with almost 30 years of experience, year-in-year-out I:
– teach dozens of second year Master’s students in Belgium, France and the UK
– co-direct the CPD Cambridge Conference Interpretation Course
– individually coach many (currently around 20) younger colleagues who aim to reach the standards allowing them to work (mostly in EN<>FR) at the highest levels of the profession in the major International Organisations
– provide master classes on various aspects of the profession, in a dozen or so countries
– coordinate the Belgian AIIC Network of Trainers
– am a prolific sponsor/presenter of young interpreters who wish to become AIIC pre-candidates
In the course of all these contacts with qualified interpreters of usually less than 5 years’ experience, and as an AIIC member who acts as advisor and coach to innumerable young colleagues taking their first steps in our beloved profession, I am asked daily to field a host of questions on how best to square the circle and navigate the challenges regarding secretariats, agencies, consortia, professional address, markets, rates etc, in a new world of DI/RSI where the old black-and-white certainties of physical meetings and geographical markets tend no longer to exist.
I should make it clear that what I am about to refer to applies not to the small minority of (almost always more experienced) conference interpreters working for International Organisations, for whom relatively little has actually changed with the coming of Covid, but to the some 90% of freelance interpreters within the profession whose everyday reality remains outside such a working environment.
Up until March 2020, on joining the profession such a freelance conference interpreter would choose a geographical and professional address and market (which usually but not always coincided), and apply the working practices which were in line with those which were customary in the relevant market – and of course these would vary from market to market and home base to home base. Geneva had one set of criteria which working interpreters have customarily applied, Paris another, Mexico City another, Berlin yet another, London another and Brussels another again….
Today, a freelance interpreter contact might be issued by a Brussels-based and Luxemburg incorporated agency to an interpreter living in London for a job to be carried out on a remote platform for a client based physically in Athens organising a virtual meeting for delegates from 12 different countries. In such a case, who can say ‘where’ and under which auspices the interpreting job takes place? Which interpreting market is in play here, and which conditions (of all kinds) apply?
When faced with the question “I’m totally confused, so what guidance does AIIC offer on all this?”, I confess that I am met with astonishment, disappointment, incomprehension and often anger when having to explain that AIIC appears to have chosen to remain absent from this admittedly tricky and often heated debate. It may of course be that AIIC has issued comprehensive advice and recommendations on the new environment, and that these has totally passed so many of us by. But in the event that this is not the case, I am asking that our Association bite the bullet and be there for our younger colleagues who are crying out for advice and leadership.
To remain absent from this fundamental debate is to risk being seen as at best irrelevant or at worst hypocritical. Indeed, several precandidates among my circle have recently informed me that they have decided to abandon their long-held objective of becoming members of AIIC, and in fact to no longer take advantage of their precandidate status, for this very reason! Others have explained that had they been tempted to join AIIC, that is now very much no longer the case.
If ever there was a time for the world’s only international professional organisation for conference interpreters to stand up and be counted – and in so doing gain much credibility, recognition and gratitude from those at the coal face who desperately want to follow the advice of their former teachers by doing the right thing, and are doing their level best to earn a living AND respect the standards of our profession – that time is now! It is important to encourage and guide, not discourage and depress, those within the latest generation of interpreters who are conscientious and professional, and who actually see our profession as more than a means to earn a living.
In some ways the current perfect storm is a golden opportunity for AIIC to reach out and gain the support of these young colleagues whose reality is often very different from yours and mine. This is THE moment when a world-wide professional association can make an essential choice and in so doing confirm or sap its legitimacy: meet a crying need by showing the way and marking its concern for our colleagues, or remain silent and become sidelined and irrelevant. Not to seize this opportunity seems to be akin to fluffing the chance to score into an open goal, or indeed to putting the ball in the back of one’s own net – and we all know what happens to players who do that…..
I am asking for AIIC to draft a set of guidelines, recommendations and best practices for freelance colleagues in a (post-)pandemic environment in which RSI/DI is very definitely here to stay:
– first of all (if as I believe this is not already the case), the sterling work already done on technical and cognitive considerations should be made freely available as open source on our website, and pointed to regularly on social media platforms
– secondly, our required professional and ethical standards are already clear and available, but could very usefully be given more visibility. Indeed, empirically I have noticed that the majority of (even experienced) AIIC members have never read these fundamental texts, or have apparently only skimmed them in years gone by, and tend to propagate errors. an oral and erroneous version of same in a “Broken telephone” sort of way!
however, these are not my primary concern, as:
– these new guidelines would need to cover advice on best practice as regards domicile/residence/address for freelancers in a world of virtual conference interpreting, but also not avoid the closely-related elephant in the room – rates and tariffs. If AIIC feels that for legal FTC-related reasons (of which most older AIIC members are fully aware, but which I have discovered are almost totally unknown to interpreters aged under 35) it must remain silent on this topic, then IT SHOULD SAY SO with the utmost clarity, and explain why, and what parameters are involved
Like you, I care about my professional association, of which I have remained a member for 30 years when as a staff interpreter I had next to nothing to gain by doing so, because AIIC matters to me. However, it is now very hard for me to explain and defend the deafening silence with which for well-nigh two years we seem to have decided to greet the revolutionary ‘new normal’.
If AIIC chooses not to show itself to be client-facing – and here it is also the “relève” which is our client – and ready and willing to help tackle the challenges of the day, then it will truly be shooting itself in the foot. If the new generation of conference interpreters continues to receive little or no guidance from the association which it has been led to believe is its greatest advocate and defender, it will instead quite understandably turn to whomever will do so, with the highly negative consequences which that involves for our entire profession. Agencies and DI platforms are certainly not proving loathe to leap into this breach, given that AIIC is nowhere to be seen….
It is already very late in the day for a reaction, after several months since ‘peak Covid’ gave way to what is a serious reawakening of interpreting markets, but there may yet be time not to lose the trust and respect of the new generation of conference interpreters who are grappling alone with a complex and difficult professional reality.
Chris Guichot de Fortis
AIIC is in a difficult position on domicile because there are those who see the need to make a change because of remote interpreting, and there are others who see that the current (old) system is still working. It all depends on your market, where you live, main clients which translates into AIIC walking a fine line. As far as I can tell the association’s officers are aware of the issue in all its permutations. I agree that AIIC needs to remain relevance, but experience has shown that most of us have our own definition. Finding a common denominator is anything but easy in a global association
AIIC hasn’t been able to use domicile as a pricing factor in the private market since the FTC decision about 30 years ago. We can use it for the International Organizations because it is part of our collectively bargained agreements with them.
I do agree with Chris that we need something clear for younger interpreters to understand and follow and not get blackballed when they wish to become members. Otherwise AIIC will disappear as we age out.
AIIC cannot dictate financial terms and stopped doing so back in the early 1990s, or possibly earlier. On the private market each meeting’s terms and conditions are agreed between the consultant interpreter and the client, and clearly if the interpreter has to travel to a meeting that would be part of those negotiations. You may find an interpreter who is willing to travel half way around the world at his own expense, but you probably wouldn’t want him on your team.
I totally agree with Chris. It is high time AIIC made a clear stand on the subject. As to not wanting interpreters who travel on their expense on your team… First of all, we already have a lot of people who are domiciled in one city and live in another. And they are not always even in the same country. So these people already travel at their own expense. And their addition to the team is often very appreciated. And second, a lot of interpreters apply the domicile concept to the private market and speak very harshly against anyone who travels to their market to work even when all the expenses are paid by the client. You can find plenty of blog posts and articles where their authors state that it is ‘unethical’ to ‘steal work’ from local interpreters even when the client wants their own interpreters to travel and is ready to bear the cost (partly because we get into a different issue of different rates in different markets here). Which means that a clear guidance from AIIC is not just welcome but essential.
“Clear stand” is where the problem lies. Different people in different sectors, markets and regions have different ideas on the issue of domicile in times of remote interpreting. AIIC has to balance all those interests. You are quite right, that over the years some interpreters have declared their domicile in a place where they can get work rather than where they live. They have had to bear their own costs (getting there and finding a place to live) but they have made up for that by getting more work in their fictitious domicile. These colleagues have been permanently domiciled in their city of choice, they have not suddenly waived the actual cost of travel for one meeting, it was (and still is for some) an enduring arrangement. The organisations have as far as I know been happy with this set-up as it has added to their local pool of talent. It’s the person desperate to work at the Paperclip Summit in Japan and who offers to travel at his own expense that should set the alarm bells ringing.
We must all accept that interpreters travel to different places to work, and the negotiated terms and conditions are their own business. They may well have been asked to accompany a client for whom they work regularly, they may have a specialism that’s in demand, they may have sought-after languages. I would not claim it’s not galling when interpreters are imported for a job that locals can do, but sometimes it’s the disgruntled local who gets to work elsewhere – swings and roundabouts. As to differential market rates, that is a subject AIIC won’t touch with a bargepole. Phil SMITH.