38: Working in EU institutions

Alexander D.: [00:00:00] [Singing.] I can just use some pre-recorded laughter and applause from somewhere.

Jonathan D.: [00:00:09] Give ourselves a clap before we even start recording the show, that's a sign of a great show coming!

Alexander G.: [00:00:15] That works.

Jonathan D.: [00:00:21] It does feel to me like my IQ goes up 10 points when I put my glasses on.

Alexander D.: [00:00:25] Careful, he put the glasses on!

Jonathan D.: [00:00:28] There's no way that I can possibly make a mistake.

Alexander G.: [00:00:31] This is literally what I always think, though.

Alexander G.: [00:00:36] Honestly, I'm always like: Should've get a haircut, should've worn something different, should've done this...  Yeah... Let's do some podcasting, people.

Jonathan D.: [00:00:48] This is a professional show!

Alexander G.: [00:00:50] Right, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Come on, you can do it.

Alexander D.: [00:00:57] Right?

Alexander G.: [00:01:03] I love it so much!

Jonathan D.: [00:01:11] Welcome to Troublesome Terps, probably the best way to spend your time in the evening or in the car or in the gym and learn something amusing about interpreting. With me, of course, we have our amazing jewel: First up, he's the man from Munich. The man who knows more about that new Berlin airport than is probably comfortable for a human being: Alexander Gansmeier.

Alexander G.: [00:01:30] I also have the best currywurst tips if you ever get around to Tegel. Alex knows it, Alex shares my views, so hit us up if you're ever around.

Jonathan D.: [00:01:40] We've spent the early part of this recording talking about how incredible his work is, making the podcast sound amazing. He is the author, the founder of the "Drechs effect", our one and only editor and Master of Ceremonies, Alexander Drechsel.

Alexander D.: [00:01:55] Oh that's that's too much, too much. Thank you, and good evening. Good to see you. And before we move on, I need to get a shoutout out to everyone who is actually listening to this in their car driving through California, because as everybody knows, there's a lot of driving to be done in California. So it's good that you're listening to us. And please drive safely!

Alexander G.: [00:02:16] Yes, with your Teslas.

Jonathan D.: [00:02:19] We don't want any Troublesome Terps related road incidents. You know, cause of accident: funny podcast.

Alexander D.: [00:02:23] God no.

Jonathan D.: [00:02:25] So, on this episode we have... Oh, actually, Alexander was gonna do the intro but I'll do it anyway! On this episode, we're coming to a subject which is dear to many interpreters' hearts and especially this time of year - we're recording this as Europe is heading towards another set of European elections. It's amazing how unelected bureaucrats can actually be elected!

Alexander G.: [00:02:48] That's a good point.

Jonathan D.: [00:02:49] As you might have guessed, we are talking about interpreting in the EU institutions and I have to say, now, I think, I've already reached my quota for making puns on why the European institutions are called institutions. So, in case you wondered, and in case any of this actually makes the final cut at all, whereas on our research episode, it was like the two Alexes dog-piling on to me and trying to ask me difficult questions. On this episode, we're turning the tables on our resident unelected eurocrat.

Alexander D.: [00:03:23] I get to be at the bottom of the pile then, is that how it works?

Jonathan D.: [00:03:28] Yes, we get to cross-examine you and make you go through hustings (which always sounds like Huskies to me, I don't know why), we get to ask you all those sorts of difficult questions that people will be asking MEP candidates at the moment.

Alexander G.: [00:03:40] The hard-hitting facts. That's right. So we're gonna just lay it on you and, yeah, hopefully get something out of you.

Alexander D.: [00:03:48] Well, there's gonna be something yeah. Maybe it's a good occasion since we are actually recording this before the elections, but we'll probably publish after the elections, by - you know - the magic of time travel. You know how this works. But maybe it's a good occasion just to do a tiny, tiny recap of what the EU actually is, how the EU actually works. For  those of you who are joining us from outside the European Union.

Alexander G.: [00:04:13] But real quick, before we get into that, please do accept our apologies for posting a few public service announcements in the run up to this election. But it's very important. So we feel like we need to kind of rally up the vote or any vote, just go out and vote!

Alexander D.: [00:04:28] Nothing to apologize for. We're not we're not telling people who to vote for.

Alexander G.: [00:04:31] That's exactly right.

Alexander D.: [00:04:32] ... to seriously consider going to cast their vote.

Jonathan D.: [00:04:35] I would like to apologize to the population of Great Britain because apparently informing people what the EU is and how it works has come three years too late.

Alexander D.: [00:04:45] That's a different topic altogether.

Alexander G.: [00:04:49] Hashtag Brexit. Excuse me, excuse me, it's the pollen in the air.

Alexander D.: [00:04:52] There are some countries - like Belgium, for example - where voting is actually mandatory. So you know we're doing people a favour by just reminding them to not forget to cast their vote and, you know, to avoid getting into trouble. Anyway, I should probably start with the most tricky part which is all the different councils that exist which trips up even some experienced EU watchers. I guess I could quiz you two and ask you about the differences but maybe we'll do that later. So let's just start with the council. So there's quite simply the Council of Europe which has nothing to do with the European Union at all, of course, so the Council of Europe is an institution that is based in Strasbourg and which mostly focuses on human rights. Many other things, too, but mostly on human rights. And it's also linked to the European Court for Human Rights which you may have heard of. And the Council of Europe includes many countries that are not part of the European Union, so we'll just leave that aside for now. That's the Council of Europe. And then we have the European Council a.k.a. "the summit". So that's what just happened a few days ago in Sibiu. The big summit. So that's where all the heads of state and government get together. So Angela Merkel and Macron and all the others get together. That's the European Council. And then we have the Council of the European Union, which is also known as the Council of Ministers and that already explains what it is. So that's where all the different ministers come together, for example for agriculture, for, I don't know transport, you name it, finance, of course. And so the Council of Ministers has different formations for these different topics. And the Council of Ministers is one part of the institutions that actually make European laws. The other one is the Parliament. So you're with me so far? Everything clear?

Alexander G.: [00:06:48] Crystal.

Jonathan D.: [00:06:50] Err, yes.

Alexander G.: [00:06:54] I mean this is just basic stuff, right?  Everybody knows this is.

Jonathan D.: [00:06:59] Is it OK, if I open IATE in the background?

Alexander G.: [00:07:02] I'm on Wikipedia, like double-checking everything that's going on. But there's a lot of balls in the air. Can we just say like it's a lot of juggling going on between the different institutions?

Jonathan D.: [00:07:12] Yeah. One thing that really does surprise me is it seems to be kind of like, not quite Chinese walls, but there seems to be a separation between the interpreters who work in each of the institutions.

Alexander G.: [00:07:22] Yeah. We'll get to that.

Jonathan D.: [00:07:22] And those who do the summit aren't necessarily those who do the Council of Ministers and a number of times I've been told off by interpreters who work for the Commission for suggesting that they might actually end up going near Parliament at any stage. It's kind of like you have your own tribes and I think you also have two separate DGs, two separate directorate-generals to manage interpreting in the European institutions... I have to get my terminology right.

Alexander D.: [00:07:47] You're just jumping ahead there a little bit, Jonathan. Let me just finish off. So we talked about all the different councils, all the different councils that there are and then there's the European Parliament which is you know that's what the whole election is about. That's where everybody gets to elect people to send to Brussels/Strasbourg and then as you know once every month or so the whole parliament, including the interpreters, gets to travel to Strasbourg for the one-week plenary meeting. So that's the Parliament, and the Parliament and the Council of Ministers together actually discuss and adopt European laws, if you will. So directives and regulations mostly. And that brings in the European Commission which is where I work. And the European Commission is the executive body in the whole sort of triangle and the European Commission is the institution that can propose new laws. And the Commission also makes sure that everybody sticks to the Treaties and if somebody does not stick to the Treaties then they can do something about it and start a legal procedure in the European Court of Justice. So that's the Court of Justice for the European Union. That's the the very, very short story of how the whole thing works.

Alexander D.: [00:08:58] And there's a division of labor there as well for the interpreters and the translators because, as we've probably mentioned on earlier shows as well, there is an interpreting service in the Commission that's SCIC (or DG Interpretation), that's where I work. There is one in the Parliament which is currently called DG LINC, I think. (That rhymes! Nice.) And there is an interpreting service in the European Court of Justice, which is very specialized because you basically need a lot of legal training on top of your interpreting training to be able to work in those meetings. The interesting thing though is that if you're a freelance interpreter and you're accredited for the European Union, you get to work for all three institutions in the same way, basically, whereas the officials or you know the "fonctionnaires" only get to work for one institution. There's an asterisk as well, but never mind. That's the easy bit.

Alexander D.: [00:09:56] I'm sure we'll get into that.

Jonathan D.: [00:09:58] We also have a strict separation between translators and interpreters because just given the nature of the work, there's no point in mixing and matching it. So interpreters interpret and translators translate. That's it.

Jonathan D.: [00:10:14] How much communication is there between the translation sections and the interpreting sections. Because I imagine that your work could often overlap where you know a term is coined by an interpreter that might not be there before and then it has to go to terminology to be settled on what time you're going to use. And it would make sense to have some kind of communication between the translation and interpreting sections to actually get consistent quality from both. Is there any such communication?

Alexander D.: [00:10:40] Yeah, there is and I think that there's more of that than there used to be in the past. I mean I can only speak for the Commission but I suppose that it's sort of similar in the other institutions as well. So what happens is for example that we have joint training courses sometimes where we can both attend and you know you get to converse with them. We sometimes have joint events or during conferences or you know interpreters will go to the to the big DGT (or DG Translation) events. So for example the big conference that is always in the autumn which is called Translating Europe, I think, so you attend each other's events. And of course we work a lot with the documents that are translated by the translators because we prefer preparing meetings in several languages and for that we use the translations that are already available for a new directive or regulation for example. And in terms of terminology I think it mostly works the way that we use the terminology that is done by terminologists and translators because they're real experts in terminology, unlike interpreters. And of course there's a certain amount of ad-hoc terminology but that usually stays in the meeting. I think we can also contribute to IATE, the big terminology database of the European Union. But a I would assume that it's not a lot. I think most of that comes from DGT or from the translators in general.

Jonathan D.: [00:12:07] Well I mean it's one thing I don't know if terminologists actually take account of, but certainly I take account of when I'm preparing a term list for a meeting is how easy a term will be to say at high speed while you're interpreting. I don't know about you, but if I have a choice between two terms and one is a tongue-twister and the other one is three syllables, I'll take the three-syllable one everyday just because it's going to be easier to see when I need to.

Alexander D.: [00:12:33] Yeah, I mean you don't always have the choice but sometimes you can you write down the acronym for example and use that instead, especially you know when it's something like finance or so. Fisheries is interesting sometimes because then you often have to use the Latin names and they don't exactly roll off the tongue.

Jonathan D.: [00:12:48] I did most of an afternoon in a Fisheries Council meeting, not for the European Union, but one of the advisory councils that sends policy recommendations. We spent an entire afternoon discussing the existence, role and importance of Xenophyophores and it got to the point where even the delegates were calling them Xeno-what-you-might-call-its. So of course if they're calling them Xeno-what-you-might-call-its, when you're going into French, you're gonna call them Xeno-n'importe-quoi, that's what you do as an interpreter. And so I have no idea if the poor person writing up the notes of the meeting ended up writing Xeno-what-you-might-call-it.

Alexander G.: [00:13:29] That's hilarious.

Alexander D.: [00:13:30] That is hilarious.

Jonathan D.: [00:13:31] You you know you talk about ad hoc terminology. I came up with an ad-hoc term for something that the French fishermen had said to try and get, you know, they did negotiate what they would do over each patch of sea. And I came up with an ad-hoc term and they ended up discussing what that meant and to the best of my knowledge that went into the document that went to the Commission. So I apologize in advance to the Commission.

Alexander D.: [00:13:52] I'll pass that on.

Alexander G.: [00:13:56] The French booth has like a picture of Jonathan in the booth, like a little crosshair on it. Oh my God. So how long have you been with the EU, Alex? To get this out of the way.

Alexander D.: [00:14:08] So I went through the whole selection procedure in 2005, 2006 and then the final interpreting exam was in November 2006 and then I freelanced for a couple of months and officially started in June 2007. So that's roughly 12 years.

Alexander G.: [00:14:27] So how long does it take you to learn that whole system, that whole apparatus and how everything interlinks and works together?

Alexander D.: [00:14:33] Oh gosh!

Alexander G.: [00:14:34] The question is kind of like did you have to figure it out yourself? Like how everything kind of connects? Or do you guys get like a sit-down training where it's like okay you're in the EU now this is how it's going down.

Alexander D.: [00:14:46] Well the thing is you're actually supposed to know that beforehand for the whole selection procedure because there are questions on how the EU works.

Alexander G.: [00:14:54] Well, good for you!

Alexander D.: [00:14:56] No, I mean there's books and there's like online courses you can get coaching to to prepare for the... They have an assessment centre and all kinds of things now. So to prepare for the whole selection procedure and then actually the most difficult part in the beginning was... not necessarily knowing how it works because that I knew because I had to, but applying that in the meeting so it's kind of the whole general meeting jargon and conference terminology plus the whole EU terminology and a lot of the things that get thrown around in meetings you know that's not necessarily the official terminology but kind of the insider slang or insider jargon rather and that takes a while to get used to. So that was actually the most difficult part in the beginning to know what a recital is. (It's not a concert.) And you know the whole procedures and you know the details of the procedures. So that was that was tricky.

Jonathan D.: [00:15:58] It would be really great if they could require people standing for MEP to have to have that same knowledge of how the thing works.

Alexander D.: [00:16:06] Oh I think a fair amount will probably know at least the basics, pretty sure about that.

Jonathan D.: [00:16:10] So what do you do there exactly and are you just stuck in Brussels all the time interpreting for the same people, drinking lots of coffee?

Alexander D.: [00:16:21] Yes, I drink a lot of coffee. No I'm not just stuck in Brussels. I mean most of my work is here. As an official in the interpreting service of the Commission, I work not only for the Commission but also for the Council of Ministers. We also work for the European Council. So we are at the summit as well. We work for smaller institutions like many of the EU agencies, for example. So we basically cover everything apart from the European Parliament and the Court of Justice. That's kind of the easiest way to explain it. And a lot of those meetings take place in Brussels, of course, all the working groups, commission meetings, committees and so on and so forth. But we also travel a fair bit. So for example, the colleagues working in the Parliament, they go to Strasbourg every month. They go on mission, too. Going on missions - sorry - means going on a trip for interpreting and going somewhere. So it's basically a business trip but we call it a "mission", from the French term "mission".

Alexander G.: [00:17:24] It also sounds much cooler than business trip.

Alexander D.: [00:17:27] Yeah, some people say it sounds a bit like a Secret Service thing. I never got that but...

Alexander G.: [00:17:33] Of course, a total James Bond vibe going on there!

Jonathan D.: [00:17:35] I thought like an interpreter going on a mission meant that you have to like jump on a speeding train and disarm a bomb.

Alexander G.: [00:17:43] All the while you have a bidule in your hand, going like "And this is only the lunch break, ladies and gentlemen!"

Alexander D.: [00:17:50] I have jumped on trains but it was not for interpreting - anyway.

Alexander G.: [00:17:56] There's a whole backstory to this. Oh Jesus! Coming up in a Troublesome Terps special episode: Why Alex Drechsel jumped on the train. Was it the Drechs effect? Who knows!

Alexander D.: [00:18:06] Possibly. We don't defuse bombs but sometimes we have to get through you know tricky technical situations.

Alexander G.: [00:18:13] Political bomb shells is what you drop?

Alexander D.: [00:18:15] Yeah, in the political and diplomatic details, I guess yeah. But I think the bulk of the work is actually in Brussels. Yes.

Jonathan D.: [00:18:25] This totally isn't in the show notes and probably won't make the final recording but as freelancers we all know that feeling of when you metaphorically defuse a bomb in a meeting.

Alexander D.: [00:18:35] Oh yeah.

Jonathan D.: [00:18:36] By realizing that someone's put their foot in it and probably doesn't realize. And if you interpret it just this way, it will stop everyone trying to kill each other, and you may get paid. Do you ever have that?

Alexander G.: [00:18:48] ... because everybody's dead?

Jonathan D.: [00:18:50] No, not literally dead. Anyway. But do you ever find yourself just smoothing over things or are you kind of... because I know court interpreters are sworn to just say it as it is said. Are you on the same norms?

Alexander D.: [00:19:06] No, not the same norms as as legal interpreters. I mean what does happen is just you know slips of the tongue you know getting a number wrong and those are things that you might as well just "correct". But the thing is that we mostly work with delegates who are very used to working in this sort of international context working with other cultures. So you don't really have these sort of incidents where you know people misunderstand each other or they misread each other and also mostly the discussions are very technical. So it's really about you know legal stuff, technical stuff. It's not about something that you know would be that would be the stuff of a serious situation that gets very heated. I mean it does happen but most of this stuff is fairly routine: negotiations or explanations, presentations, so since people are mostly very experienced with this there's actually very few situations where it gets really, really tricky. I don't really recall any situation where that happened to be honest. Maybe it's then sort of it could be personal animosities or personal antipathy or something like that but it's very rare, I think.

Alexander G.: [00:20:18] So how does it work though? Because I mean especially in this day and age there's a lot of politicians who don't behave like normal politicians. I don't know. I really don't know how else to say it. And I mean there have been some stories out of the EU that that kind of stuff also happens in their meetings, wherever they may take place. Have you guys run into anything in your booth where you were like: Oh, did this just... Was this just what he said, what they said, what she said? Or like did you guys kind of get spared by all of this so far?

Alexander D.: [00:20:49] Yeah I think that that's mostly something that happens in the Parliament. So I think what working at the parliament is much more is much more like what you call that a high wire act. So. It can be really really difficult. First of all because you have these you know strong political personalities that sort of can clash in meetings, especially in the plenary with all the attention that it gets, and the media attention. And on top of that you have the fact that especially the plenary meetings are web-streamed, a lot of other meetings are web-streamed as well. So people will listen to the interpretation, people will pick up on things and we don't really have that because we don't work with politicians that that much, we mostly work with you know experts in the field of I don't know you know environmental protection or fisheries you know discussing quotas maybe so that could be heated but it's usually fairly level-headed, let's say.

Alexander G.: [00:21:42] I like the high wire act because I feel like that describes the kind of...

Alexander D.: [00:21:46] But that's what it looks like. Because I think also the interpreting is recorded. So if you go back and you re-watch a webcast of a plenary meeting you can listen to the interpretation coming from all the booths and you know if you want to go through that with the fine tooth comb. Stuff like that and people do that occasionally.

Alexander G.: [00:22:05] Okay so this is really interesting and I might be kind of jumping ahead a couple of questions that we have. I don't really know. But when...  I mean I don't know if you guys ever get recorded if you're on a mission or if you do like expert discussions or if that's kind of all like "off the record". But if the colleagues in the plenary session if they get recorded. I mean when I get recorded and I'm sure Jonathan is the same way you get an extra fee for the recording for the copyright, but for you guys like you get a monthly wage and whatever you guys do in that monthly wage,  it's all covered and that is kind of how it goes. So whether you're...

Alexander D.: [00:22:42] That's 100 percent how it goes.

Alexander G.: [00:22:43] Yeah. So like it really doesn't matter what you do whether you do like five days of plenary sessions. Well, that's probably not happening. But you know, whether you do five days of this or whether you're in Brussels for a whole month or whether you're actually three weeks on a mission like you, this is just all kind of covered in your standard thing, your brief, and you get that at the beginning of the month and then that's kind of: off you go!

Alexander D.: [00:23:04] Yeah. So it's all covered by your salary. So that covers what you do. And it also because we had an interesting discussion about that on Twitter the other day, about the copyright that you have when you're interpreting and as a freelancer you should, you hopefully have a clause in your contract that covers that.

Alexander G.: [00:23:24] If you don't, please include that!

Alexander D.: [00:23:26] Yeah exactly. Because some clients try to sneak that in and just record you know "for later", "just in case we want to listen to anything".

Alexander G.: [00:23:32] "Just for the minutes, we're not going to, we're actually going to use it internally. Well you know, since we have it."

Alexander D.: [00:23:39] For us, that's just covered. And in terms of workload I don't think that's maybe really getting into the weeds now but in terms of workload we don't get more money if we work more. We then get sort of compensation with free time if we have a particularly stressful period. You know, you get a half day off or stuff like that. But you don't get more money, and it's the same for freelancers. So if you work as a freelancer in the plenary then for that day you are also basically like an official or an employee of the institution. And that covers your copyright and everything else as well.

Alexander G.: [00:24:08] So even for the freelancers, the same rules apply.

Alexander D.: [00:24:11] You know, for all intents and purposes, you do the same work and it is just the same as the person sitting next to you in the booth.

Alexander G.: [00:24:17] Interesting.

Jonathan D.: [00:24:19] I mean it's an interesting thing of having freelancers and staffers together. That always struck me as a really interesting decision. I can understand the excess capacity issue that you would have in something the size of the EU where you would have moments where you know demand exceeds supply. Do you, do the staffers notice any difference when freelancers are in, not necessarily on quality since I guess testing would cover that but on the different approaches to how to solve certain interpreting problems or you know how intimate their knowledge might be of this person's point of view or that person's point of view.

Alexander D.: [00:24:58] That's a good question. I mean the work is exactly the same as you just said. I'm not sure of there's a difference in approach to or a difference of interpreting strategies I guess. I don't think so. Because the truth is that many of the freelancers who work with the institutions work a lot for the institution. So you know how they work. And as you said you know that the accreditation test covers that, so you would be at the same sort of level of quality as a staffer. Yeah.

Alexander G.: [00:25:29] Yeah. And then even... I would just assume that if you are a freelancer seeking out work at the institutions you'd be kind of inclined to those topics, you know, like, you're interested in kind of keeping up with politico.eu or whatever it is. I'm just saying like you're interested in the subject matter just like you... I don't know...

Alexander D.: [00:25:49] That makes it much easier.

Alexander G.: [00:25:50] Yeah it does make it a lot easier. You know just like I'm not reading like a bunch of like I don't know tablet computer chip whatever blogs. They probably read the same stuff so they probably are kind of up to scratch. That's really good. Yeah. So that's really interesting. So you've already said that if you're a freelancer you can still work for the EU. You can still get a decent amount of work for the EU with the accreditation test which I guess, I don't know if we want to spend too much time on the accreditation test, but it's kind of infamous. Like you know it is sort of the stuff of interpreting legends.

Jonathan D.: [00:26:23] And nightmares.

Alexander G.: [00:26:24] That is much more appropriate. Yeah. So if you could just like give a really short rundown of what it entails and then there's obviously also an interpretation, like an actual interpretation part to it. Maybe just some details on that, what they want to see from you.

Alexander D.: [00:26:44] Yeah I mean those are two different things though. So if you want to become a permanent official, you have to go through the whole sort of selection procedure with the European Personnel Selection Office or EPSO in short because we have an acronym for everything. So that of course is a much more convoluted procedure because theoretically at least if you were to go through the whole procedure you become a permanent official. As an interpreter, basically, you could always switch to another department in the Commission. So that's a very rigorous procedure where you have you know general knowledge, knowledge about the EU, verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, you know, sort of logical thinking... all the things that we're not very good at, or at least some - I'll speak for myself - that I'm not very good at. And then at the end you have the interpreting test. Whereas if you want to be accredited as a freelance interpreter - so you basically want the EU to become your client - then it's "just" an accreditation test so that focuses much more on testing your interpreting capabilities. So that's that's the big difference basically. And yeah, you said that the accreditation tests are a little bit infamous. That's true. I think what many people don't realize is that the accreditation test is actually a lot of work i.e. also cost for the institutions because of course we have to make colleagues available from the respective languages to be on the jury. To prepare everything, to select the people that we want to test, to invite them. Speeches have to be written to be given to the candidates to interpret. We have to book the room, you know, all these these things cost a lot of time and money so of course we want to make sure that people actually pass. You know I mean we run the accreditation test because we need new colleagues. We're not doing that for fun or to sort of put people down or criticize them. And that's what maybe sometimes people don't realize all that much. So we really have an interest in having new colleagues. So we want to make sure they can show that they know how to interpret. So we're not trying to give them extra-tough speeches to you know show how bad they are. Stuff like that. So we have I think fairly normal speeches and doable speeches to make sure they can show their interpreting skills, both in consecutive and simultaneous. So that's kind of the idea and I think that's that's probably enough for the whole testing thing because you know the procedure changes from time to time and also the profile that we are looking for changes. So you know that's kind of in flux but it's all on the website if you're interested in the details. We have a lot of links here as well, not only on this.

Alexander G.: [00:29:30] Exactly, so we're interested in that, just look it up.

Jonathan D.: [00:29:33] I was going to say, has there been any discussion about kind of historic changes in pass rates? Because I'm aware that certainly when I did my training a lot of the interpreter training at university level was very much geared to diplomacy, politics and international organizations. It seems to me that that's still there but in some universities they're kind of turning more towards private-market-faced stuff which to my understanding involves a slightly different set of interpreting skills. You know you've studied basic interpreting but there's something different that happens if you're at a demolition meeting or a business negotiation that you don't really get in the EU. Has that affected pass rates at all?

Alexander D.: [00:30:14] Ooh, that's a very technical question. And I'm not familiar with the pass rates to be honest. And those will vary because there are so many factors that play into it. But I mean just on the - and Alex, correct me if I'm wrong - but I think Germany trains much less for the institutions.

Alexander G.: [00:30:30] Yes, I think so.

Alexander D.: [00:30:32] And the thing is also that the demand coming from the institutions was actually very, very important for those "smaller" countries and for the interpreting training there. Because for example when the big enlargement happened in 2004, when a lot of new countries joined, some of those countries didn't have any interpreter or really you know graduate-level interpreter training. So SCIC and the other institutions were sort of instrumental in getting that up to speed because we needed the people trained to that level. And so the training had to be funded and supported. And we were sort of lobbying with the universities to to build up those capacities to make sure we we could have those people coming from there.

Alexander G.: [00:31:13] That makes a lot of sense. But it's true Jonathan what you say as well is that the different universities have widely different curricula when it comes to private markets focus or institution focus. Just a quick side note: my cousin is also studying to be an interpreter so I guess it kind of somehow runs in the family. But she's living and studying in Vienna and she said that Vienna is strictly focused on the institutional market and it's also very theoretical up to a certain point and they are strictly trained to be that, to be institutional interpreters with C languages, they get to pick them, they get to learn them on top of everything else. Whereas with my training in the UK the whole selling point of that course for example was: We do not train for institutional interpreters, we train people to be private market entrepreneurs, if you will. So that was really the selling point.

Alexander D.: [00:32:11] That's a big difference, right?

Alexander G.: [00:32:13] Yeah.

Jonathan D.: [00:32:14] I think even within the private market training and the private market thinking... So my training was heavily institutional and heavily international organization, quite heavy politics with a little bit on kind of technical meetings. Whereas my freelance practice, I've had the technical meetings, I've done a couple of EWCs (European Works Councils, for those who don't know them)...

Alexander D.: [00:32:34] It's EU-adjacent work.

Jonathan D.: [00:32:37] But I've also had commercial conferences where the trend is far more towards, you know, yes, be keen (if anyone can define what accuracy is), but also, we need you to sound as, if not more, convincing than the original speakers. So you know if you're doing a conference where people are trying to persuade people of how amazing their new technique is and "You should come to our stand to hear more"... 

Alexander G.: [00:33:04] Right.

Jonathan D.: [00:33:04] You know that the understanding, the thing being "get us in to do whatever it is that we do", then if the interpreter is technically brilliant but can't deliver compelling public speaking for toffee, they shouldn't be there. Whereas there are some meetings where you don't really need any interpreting style, you just need to be able to deliver acronym after acronym after acronym and everything would be OK.

Alexander D.: [00:33:28] Yeah.

Alexander G.: [00:33:29] But that's also its own sort of art form because on a day, like, as soon as interpreters hear acronyms just one after the other, it's just kind of the same effect when you hear somebody rattling down their annual balance sheet and you just hear number after number and it just goes, like, "Oh my God, numbers! Oh my God, acronyms! What is going on?" And then you just kind of, yeah, so you know...

Jonathan D.: [00:33:51] The accounts talk.

Alexander D.: [00:33:54] But acronyms are sort of everywhere these days, no?

Alexander G.: [00:34:00] They are, they really are they. That's true. But honestly like with  finance and also like IT, and you know a lot of those things, in medicine and medical interpreting, those acronyms oftentimes really stay the same so I'm guessing with EU, just look at GDPR, I'm sure the acronym in every country is completely different. And so you have to really be aware of the acronyms and how they kind of intersect around the continent, whereas with - I don't know - finance, whatever... Yeah, it always stays in English.

Jonathan D.: [00:34:33] So in IT, a Cat 5 cable is always... maybe a "Cat cinque", but that just gets confusing in French. I was going to say so like the bête noir of many freelance interpreters is the dreaded budget talk or the dreaded finance talk. Do you ever have to do like eight hours or three days of budget meetings?

Alexander D.: [00:34:53] Yes, yeah. So in the German booth at least in the Commission we have a pool of, sort of a subgroup of, people who specialize on finance and budget. So I work in the Budget Committee quite a bit and also in other finance-heavy meetings. And yeah those can be quite taxing. (See what I did there?)

Jonathan D.: [00:35:18] Can you get away with (because my escape clause is always the word "roundabout" or "environ"), can you get away with that in the EU? "It's about a couple of billion Euro, couple of billion either way."

Alexander D.: [00:35:29] But you see, unless you're working from French, the figures are usually not a huge problem because often you have a presentation or you know it's kind of a meeting document to go by, but it's really also the budget terminology and you know how the whole thing works and all the you know budget cycles which is often even more difficult than the figures.

Alexander G.: [00:35:52] Wasn't the Belgian French anyway... like "nonante" or something? I heard... 

Jonathan D.: [00:35:57] It is so much better than French French. I'm gonna lose about a thousand listeners now...

Alexander G.: [00:36:01] So Alex because we already covered the freelancers starting work for the EU. Now you as a staffer, as a full-time staffer for the EU, would you be able to take on any freelance work? If I said I have this amazing automotive conference in Brussels. Alex, are you free? You can.

Alexander D.: [00:36:19] No, I'm not free. No, I have only one master and that's the European Commission.

Alexander G.: [00:36:27] And we'll just leave it at that.

Alexander D.: [00:36:29] No, I mean it's, there's really not much more to say. It's a no. And that's it. No, I can't do any freelance interpreting.

Jonathan D.: [00:36:37] So say for example I mean there's two questions leading off of that but the first one is say for example the EU where to implode and disappear in a mist somewhere. Would you, how many, or let's just saw rather than "how many", would your average staff colleague thrust into the welcoming bowels of the private market? Would they be comfortable there or would they look for "is there another institution I can go for and get the same kind of interpreting environment?"

Alexander D.: [00:37:07] That's a good question. I don't know, to be honest. I mean that's probably a question that you have to ask each and every of the 500 or so of us. And I think you'd get a lot of different answers. I think we have a lot of colleagues who are very passionate about interpreting and really, really love the job, so they might go somewhere else to be able to keep interpreting, and others would probably appreciate staying in the institution and doing something else there because there's plenty of you know very interesting jobs in the Commission or in the Parliament. So you'll get a lot of different replies. And to be frank, if you're asking me, I don't know. I would have to think about it.

Jonathan D.: [00:37:52] But I think there is a question... So I'm banging this drum at the moment about how interpreting is interpreting, no matter where you do it, who you do it for, which setting you're in. But a lot of people, even amongst interpreters we seem to have different personalities that are attracted to different environments. And also I think different people's family situations as well - so you might get some people who say you know my other half wouldn't survive, wouldn't want to try to survive for five minutes in a city that has as many interests as Brussels does.

Alexander G.: [00:38:25] Imagine that noise level!

Alexander D.: [00:38:26] It's not that bad, you know? You don't really see them in the street. You know it's not like, ooh, there's an interpreter!

Jonathan D.: [00:38:33] They just take off all the coffee shops at the end of every day.

Alexander D.: [00:38:36] Oh there's a lot of other people there as well.

Jonathan D.: [00:38:38] The other question that comes off of the whole idea of, you know, you have one master, is what is the process for work allocation and do you ever have the right to say, okay, this meeting's come in, for the sake of my conscience or for the sake of whatever, I would not feel comfortable doing that. Please can I be reallocated?

Alexander G.: [00:39:01] That is a really good question and I have so many follow-up questions!

Alexander D.: [00:39:04] I'm just gonna explain how it works then. I'll keep thinking in the back of my head about the whole conscience thing. Yeah. I mean it's a big machine that we're working in. So what happens is that when a Commission directorate-general or a Council working group decides to have a meeting (and many of those meetings happen on a regular basis anyway, so there's a lot of routine and repetition in there). But yeah we have departments or units rather in the service that sort of accept these requests for meetings and we have an IT system where all of that is managed, where you can capture sort of the size of the meeting, the languages that are required, where it takes place and all of that. And of course usually the demand is much higher than the supply, both the supply of interpreters and also the supply of available meeting rooms. So there has to be a what we call "arbitrage". So it's a decision process, a weighting process that needs to take place where you decide which meeting can go ahead with which languages in which room basically and there's a little bit of flexibility because you know maybe there you take away the Polish booth and then you add a Dutch booth or something. There's a little bit of wiggle room there. But once that happens then we basically have two different teams. One team is called the Planning Unit, and the Planning Unit is always in charge for the current week basically because there's a lot of changes also sort of during the week. Meetings get cancelled, meetings get shortened from a full day to a half-day or the other way round, they get prolonged from a half-day to full day. That kind of things, so they take care of that and they take care of the ongoing week and making sure all the interpreters are where they're supposed to be. And then we have the programming unit which is sort of the forward-looking unit which does the the future planning sort of for the following weeks and months. So once the... well, to simplify things, once the meeting is in the system then you try to find the interpreters that you have available and maybe you have to book a few freelancers to fill a few holes that have popped up here and there. You reserve the meeting rooms and all of that. Yeah. And then you as an interpreter you get slotted in somewhere, you know, which is one of the reasons that some interpreters would never really want to do that or wouldn't want to do this exclusively because I mean you have very little... agency is a big word, but you have very little influence in the end. Most of it is determined by your language combination obviously. So you'll get put into the meetings where you make sense with the languages that you can provide. So Commission meetings typically have a smaller number of languages whereas the Council of course has a bigger need, a wider need for languages. So yeah. And in terms of turning down I would say not really. I mean that's I mean as a freelancer you can always influence the number of days that you get hired by the institution. So usually you offer a certain amount of days and then you get booked for a certain number of days. But once you're booked for the day you have no influence on what kind of meeting that is. You don't see the meeting, you just get, let's say, the 15th of May. And then that could be a fisheries meeting or the budget committee or a public consultation on topic X, it could be whatever. And also, you know, because there can always be last-minute changes, you can only get booked for a day. You don't necessarily get booked for a specific meeting unless you have maybe a very, very specific language combination or something but not usually. And as an official, no, you don't really get to say no. I mean I'm a bit hard pressed to come up with a meeting that would sort of clash with my conscience. I'm not really sure. That's part of the deal of being an official.

Jonathan D.: [00:43:06] So it's kind of then... you've got this tradeoff between financial stability and knowing that next week you're going to have interpreting work and next year you're going to have a salary. But in return for that you give up - and I think agency is probably the right word here - the agency that freelancers have. You know if a job, an assignment comes in, we can look at it and go, for whatever reason, we can say no, whether it's we don't feel we have the expertise on that, which I don't think would be an EU issue, or whether it's "I've seen the list of speakers at that meeting and I don't feel that I can interpret fairly from that speaker or this topic is something that I mentally don't agree with". So you get the stability in return for giving up your agency. Whereas we get less stability but in return for more agency.

Alexander D.: [00:43:52] Yeah. I mean you don't give it up but you know your sort of possibilities to shape or influence that is quite limited shall we say. I mean, because you said "give up your agency", it sounds a bit like you don't even think about things anymore you're just you know taking orders. That's not what I mean. But I mean yeah there's just very little flexibility due to the nature of the whole system and how it works.

Alexander G.: [00:44:19] I also like when you said earlier there's kind of it's not directly related to that but you said earlier that you only serve one master and everybody always says to me "Oh, it's so great that you're a freelance interpreter, you have all the freedom in the world. I'm like: No. I don't. You know, you serve one master. Every client is my master. I serve so many different clients, so in a way, we have the agency, but then: Do we really? You know, all that much? So it's kind of different. Yeah it's different. Yeah it's kind of same-same, but different.

Jonathan D.: [00:44:52] I would say also those of us who build interpreting teams there's this weird tradeoff that happens I don't know if you find this Alex where if you're building a team on the one hand everyone looks to you because you're building the team but on the other hand you're serving the team because you have to ensure that the the rates are right, you have to ensure that conditions are right, you have to ensure the equipment's right. And so you have pressures from both sides, you have a high chance of a certain amount and you have interpreters, and you would love to give them more and you're kind of where you're actually everyone's servant rather than anyone's master.

Alexander G.: [00:45:25] A 100 percent. I fully 100 percent agree to that.

Alexander D.: [00:45:28] But we have a similar concept so what we have is the head of team. So in every meeting there will be a head of team and of course you know if I'm head of team, I don't get to pick the interpreters that are on the meeting but I am basically not really their boss but I'm more of their advocate in a way so I have to make sure for example that the meeting president sort of sticks to the rules that exist. So you know there needs to be a lunch break of a certain time and the morning session can only be four hours maximum, that kind of thing. So I have to make sure that the working conditions are respected, I have to make sure that all the colleagues get the documents in the booth and that kind of thing. So yeah it's not exactly the same thing as a consultant interpreter but the idea is similar.

Alexander G.: [00:46:13] So this brings up a very interesting point because you know they always say interpreting is a flat profession and to a certain extent that's true in the freelance market. Do you guys in the institutions have any way of kind of advancing up the ladder, the career ladder. Is becoming the chef d'équipe, the organizing interpreter, person in charge, like, is that kind of what everybody aspires to or is that basically a rotating system, everybody gets to do it at one point. How does that work?

Alexander D.: [00:46:43] Yeah I mean the whole head of team thing is not really something to...

Alexander G.: [00:46:51] To aspire to?

Alexander D.: [00:46:52] No, that's not what I mean.

Alexander G.: [00:46:53] Who wants to do that?

Alexander D.: [00:46:54] It's not like a distinction or like an award or something, you know, it's just something that comes with the job. So you know you can be there for you know maybe not two weeks, but... Because the planning unit will know you know this is a very junior colleague so we won't bother him with his task and you'll pick a more experienced colleague just for practical reasons. Overall it is quite flat because you know I have colleagues who have been doing this for 30 or maybe even longer years and they do the same meetings that I do. So because there are so many meetings and there isn't really a lot of hierarchy. I mean some meetings are more prestigious than others. Of course it's nice to be working at the summit, at the European Council or for the weekly meeting of the Commissioners. But apart from that there isn't really that much difference. I mean it's something that I like. But you know it can be frustrating to others because some people really like you know having this sort of this career path in front of them and the only thing that changes basically is the salary over time, that's about it. And then maybe over time you get to evaluate your colleagues or stuff like that. But it's really it's mostly small things.  There isn't a huge difference.

Jonathan D.: [00:48:10] And I think this is kind of what both attracts people to interpreting and puts them off is that you know you can be doing - I don't know about Germany - but in the UK market, you can be doing a prestigious meeting from the Scottish Parliament one day and three days later you could be in a muddy field with your Wellie boots on and doing some truck stuff. And I imagine you don't get the same range of mud to cultural summits. Do you get that range of you know some meetings are really prestigious and you know the press are all there and the next time you're in a small room off a corridor somewhere trying to help people in fisheries decide on quotas. You know, d'you go from the sublime to the ridiculous at all?

Alexander D.: [00:48:50] Oh I get mud all right. I mean that's kind of specific for my case because I have active English so I work German-English/English-German and that means that I get to go on mission quite often in Germany, in Austria for inspection trips for example. So that will be Commission inspectors inspecting you know accounts, books, records, that kind of thing but it can also happen that you have like a food and veterinary inspection for you know animal welfare or plant protection and then you really go you know into the action as it were. So I have actually been walking around in fields measuring parcels. I have been to slaughterhouses and looking at hygiene and stuff like that. So but that's rather unusual. Most of it really happens in these fairly hygienic meeting rooms.

Jonathan D.: [00:49:45] What's it about the EU and slaughterhouses. I was talking to an EU translator not so long ago who said that he was building a de facto specialism in slaughterhouses. It's like 50 percent about killing things.

Alexander D.: [00:49:56] No, it's not about killing things it's yeah it's just about enforcing the rules that are in place for reasons like BSE and you know that kind of jazz.

Jonathan D.: [00:50:06] So what does a typical day look like? Is it the equivalent of you know having a nine-to-five office job?

Alexander D.: [00:50:12] Pretty much. Yeah. As I said a couple of times now there's a fair amount of routine involved because you know I get my program for the week. I know where to go. And most of the meetings have a sort of a structure so they usually start in the morning. Then you go on for a couple of hours you have a lunch break. Then in the afternoon you go on for a couple of more hours and that's about it. So yeah it's almost like an office job to some extent.

Jonathan D.: [00:50:40] I mean this is the thing because I talked to some interpreters and they're all, well, "I'm so glad I don't work in an office". But in a way if you're a staffer, that is what you do although you have the added thing of missions. Does that help you? Because there's a dreaded question among freelancers about work-life balance. So is your work-life balance basically that you know you're doing nine-to-five Monday to Friday. You know you've got every weekend off. You don't have to worry too much about accountants or invoicing or anything like that. You just have to worry about editing podcasts.

Alexander D.: [00:51:14] Now the work-life balance is an interesting issue because due to the stability that I have. I think that helps me in getting sort of the work-life balance right. On the other hand you know when you when you travel I mean that just means that you're away from your family, sometimes just one day or two days, sometimes it's like Sunday to Friday when it's one of these longer missions. And as I said I mean there's not much that you can do about it. It just comes with the job. And also you have actually very little flexibility. So simple things like getting a dentist appointment. It can be very difficult because I usually try to get that in you know either very early in the morning or maybe kind of around lunchtime so as to avoid that it eats too much into the actual booth time because you know I can say to our planning team "okay, I have a dentist appointment that day at that time". But if it means that I have to leave you know in the middle of the morning and just leave my colleagues hanging to some extent, that's just not great. So you're trying to avoid that as much as possible. And also you never really know how long a meeting will last. You know it might be scheduled until six thirty and then sometimes you're not done at four, sometimes you're done at three, but sometimes it takes like until six thirty and sometimes you have like a late evening meeting and there's very little that you can do about that.

Alexander G.: [00:52:46] Okay. So I know this from the European Patent Office in Munich. A lot of colleagues in Munich work for the European Patent Office. Also a lot of people from outside of Germany come in to the European Patent Office and they have the exact same thing. Like sometimes they get in and they know that the day starts at 10:00 and they have no idea how long it goes. Some days they're out by 11:00 because nobody showed up and then the next day they're out by 9 p.m. So that's really interesting.

Jonathan D.: [00:53:14] How do they make up for that? Because I know there's a huge deal about not interpreting for too long because you know it's actually bad for you. If you end up in a meeting that's scheduled for three hours and that is actually going on to 12:00. Do you have relief teams that come in after eight hours or do you just have to keep going with it and planning probably will make up for it later.

Alexander D.: [00:53:35] Yeah I think it really depends on on the status of the meeting. So if it's - I'm just going to say - if it's an ordinary working group then they have a hard limit at six thirty in the evening. Yeah, I should explain it a little bit differently. So there's no there's not really a maximum amount of time that you can work in a given day. So just one rule of thumb with the Commission you can work from 8:00 in the morning until six thirty in the evening with a 90-minute lunch break and the morning cannot be longer than four hours. That's kind of sort of the basic structure that we have in place. But if it's anything you know like a Council of Ministers or any high-level meeting then they can either request in advance that it's going to be a late meeting then that's fine, you know, then that will be accommodated. And if it's sort of a last minute thing then of course you know if it's a Council of Ministers then there will be a replacement team standing by to take over at six thirty. I'd say it really kind of depends on the status of the meeting and whether you know it in advance.

Jonathan D.: [00:54:41] You're almost totally reliant on goodwill. If you've got family you're almost as reliant on the goodwill of your family as we are.

Alexander G.: [00:54:50] Totally.

Jonathan D.: [00:54:50] But for different reasons.

Alexander D.: [00:54:52] Exactly. Although for you guys I think most jobs involve travel, right, at least to some extent?

Jonathan D.: [00:55:00] I mean it depends. Most of my career has been spent at kind of Edinburgh/Glasgow, a few jobs up in Aberdeen and Inverness, where Edinburgh/Glasgow are fine. I'm usually home by dinner or at least by bedtime. Aberdeen/Inverness it's an over-night. Anything other than that is an overnight but because of the mark-up here, no one's getting 300 days a year in Scotland, that I'm aware of. So there's big gaps between jobs.

Alexander D.: [00:55:26] That would be a lot of days anyway!

Jonathan D.: [00:55:27] Yeah but you know I'm not even sure how many of my colleagues who mostly work in Scotland are getting probably more than 100 even, if that. Maybe some aren't even getting any more than 30 or whatever. And so there can be big gaps between them, in fact, all of the interpreters I know who are not institution-registered, are all "interpreter and". And a lot of us will chose jobs where you're "interpreter and". And so for some people they will do an "and", that'll give them steady hours so they might be interpreter and lecturer where they know roughly where the hours are going to fit. Or they're interpreter and translator and so people I think tend to go for work-life balance that way that their "and job" is one that allows them to have more work-life balance so that when the odd interpreting... You know, they've built up that goodwill. Even something as simple as you know if you're a staffer for the EU getting an Amazon package delivered, it would be a nightmare! Because like hardly anyone gives you a time, and if they do give you a time, you get it like between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. So yeah, thanks!

Alexander D.: [00:56:34] But that's the same for everyone who has a job that involves going to an office or a factory. You know, just pick it up at the post office on the weekend or something.

Jonathan D.: [00:56:43] We have like some of our kind of petrol stations now have like Amazon lockers. You can have it delivered to and go and get it there.

Alexander D.: [00:56:52] Yeah we have a similar thing in Belgium for the Belgian post office and the Germans have that as well.

Alexander G.: [00:56:56] Yes. Hashtag product placement. We should get paid for this.

Jonathan D.: [00:57:00] I think they should actually have one of those locker systems at the Commission. And just like everything delivered to Alexander Drechsel c/o of the Commission in this case.

Alexander G.: [00:57:10] Oh my God, a colleague of mine used to have that though, because - a complete side note - she used to work in a carpet factory and they had an Amazon room where like all of the packages were delivered every day and like by the end of the day that room was like bursting at its seams every day. It's crazy you know. She'd like show me a picture once, it was crazy.

Jonathan D.: [00:57:28] Like if you're on staff at some places so if you work for a university you will often get mail to your university address because it's university business stuff. Do you ever get mail delivered - silly... - do you have like an office that's yours at the Commission for when you're not on duty? And do you ever get mail delivered to your care of the Commission?

Alexander D.: [00:57:51] I do get mail but maybe once or twice a year and there's not much mail anymore these days.

Alexander G.: [00:57:56] Those are our fan letters, Jonathan.

Alexander D.: [00:58:00] Yeah exactly. No the thing is we don't have an office. Our heads of booth have offices and all the admin people of course but interpreters don't have offices. We have sort of common rooms, so it's usually for two or three different booths or language units put together, so there's a couple of computers if you need to do any sort of office, admin work you can do that there if you want to. And we have mailboxes and that's about it and maybe a nice plant or something. Not a nice plant, just a plant.

Jonathan D.: [00:58:32] And let me guess: a really nice coffee machine!

Alexander D.: [00:58:35] No, no, there's no coffee machine.

Alexander G.: [00:58:37] What? Oh, Jonathan what you didn't know is that the EU is teetotal terps!

Jonathan D.: [00:58:41] So can we just make an announcement now? We would like to ask all of the interpreting directorate-generals: Please could you put coffee machines in the interpreters' common rooms? For that small expenditure, the quality of your interpreting will go through the roof.

Alexander G.: [00:58:57] Yeah that's the ROI! Hashtag acronym.

Alexander D.: [00:59:00] I'd rather have the coffee machine in the booth then because you know these common rooms are actually quite far away from the meeting rooms that I work at. So it's not really practical to go there.

Jonathan D.: [00:59:08] You can't have a coffee machine in the booth! Can you imagine you're in the middle of interpreting fisheries [inaudible].

Alexander G.: [00:59:16] "I said a latte macchiato, not a cappuccino! What are you doing?"

Alexander D.: [00:59:20] "What are you doing?"

Jonathan D.: [00:59:22] Oh yeah because no interpreter is ever precious about their coffee.

Alexander D.: [00:59:25] No that's not a thing.

Alexander G.: [00:59:26] Oh my God. Oh Jesus Christ. All right. So moving on from coffee machines because we have more questions to get to, people. So obviously the EU has I believe 24 languages at the moment that are being interpreted in and out of, give or take.

Alexander D.: [00:59:42] The 24th is Irish. There's not not a lot of interpreting in and out of Irish but it does exist.

Alexander G.: [00:59:48] Twenty three and a half, alright. So when I was a young interpreter, an even younger interpreter, I should say.

Alexander D.: [00:59:57] There was the time, time was...

Alexander G.: [00:59:59] Yeah. 'T was a long time ago. I can still remember... But I was basically told to not even bother applying to the European Union unless I had at least two working languages besides my native language and to not even bother if the language combination was any combination of German, English and French because everybody did that. So I know that obviously you have a lot of other languages going on as well. Tons, tons, guys. Yeah, I didn't know, Alex has like...

Alexander D.: [01:00:27] Countless numbers of languages!

Alexander G.: [01:00:29] ...like eleven dozen C languages.

Jonathan D.: [01:00:32] He even speaks Dothraki.

Alexander D.: [01:00:34] I don't even like Game of Thrones but that's another discussion.

Alexander G.: [01:00:37] Yeah let's not even get into that. Can I just say really quickly as a quick side note I saw an interview with the CEO of Duolingo yesterday on CNBC. And he was saying that more people learn Klingon from Star Trek and Dothraki from Game of Thrones than learn Gaelic.

Alexander D.: [01:01:00] That's unfortunate. Should be the other way around.

Alexander G.: [01:01:02] Yeah. I didn't really know what to make of that but I thought it was a very interesting side note so here's the random fact of the day for you guys. Yeah. So the question is how did you go about learning all these languages because I'm sure you didn't come in there with your Romanian and Dothraki fluent. So how did that work.

Alexander D.: [01:01:19] Well let's just leave the Dothraki aside for a while but I actually did come in with all the languages that I have right now.

Alexander G.: [01:01:28] Cut, break, rewind!

Alexander D.: [01:01:31] No no but if you're interested in how the language learning works. Yeah. I mean people of course add new languages while they are on on staff and there are basically two different ways. One is you can just follow a language course, an internal language course in SCIC or in the Commission. Certainly for the sort of bigger languages like you know Italian, Spanish, German, English, French, Dutch, and so on. And another possibility is that you get a what we call "training voucher" so you get a fixed amount of money like a budget and you organize your own training so you can get a private teacher, you can take classes, you know, do a Skype coaching that kind of thing on your own time. And then there are also possibilities to go abroad you know to go to the country where you study the language for a while and just be in the country, maybe go to the university, follow a few lectures, that kind of thing. So there is a system in place to help people add new languages, because especially the big languages like German, English, French, Italian, Spanish are always in demand and they aren't going to go away and to some extent also the "smaller languages". So there is a system in place for language learning and also for other training courses on the actual topics. So we regularly have training courses on budget terminology, how agriculture works, what the latest developments in fisheries are, you know, new topics that come in like maybe in the field of environment or transport. Yeah. And usually those training courses happen in what we call slow periods. So when there are fewer meetings than usual and people are you know easier to take out - as we say "take out of the program" - and... There's a funny thing in our sort of scheduling system: When you have a day of leave or you know something where you where you're not in the booth, it says "not available for programming" or "indisponible pour la programmation", which is kind of funny. There you go.

Jonathan D.: [01:03:44] So you are all androids, I was wondering about that.

Alexander G.: [01:03:47] Yes, the Terminator is real.

Jonathan D.: [01:03:49] Do you have space on your weekly or monthly schedule set aside for you to keep you know adding a language or learning more, or is it just you know they wait until you're not as in demand and then you can learn stuff at that point?

Alexander D.: [01:04:02] I mean it's always easier in slow periods to sort of you know give you some time off for doing stuff. Sometimes, for very technical meetings you can get study time - étude documents - so you get some time if you have like a huge amount of very technical documents to prepare for a meeting, sometimes you get time off for that. But otherwise usually we try to organize it in a way that is you know not as disruptive for the normal interpreting work.

Alexander G.: [01:04:31] That's really cool. I like that. So how many people take Esperanto language courses?

Alexander D.: [01:04:37] Probably zero?

Jonathan D.: [01:04:40] But the thing is as well as that there has been a big discussion: I have a Tumblr account, if anyone remembers Tumblr, it was like...

Alexander D.: [01:04:51] Tumblr is the site where you always have to confirm that you actually want to see the site before you get there, right?

Alexander G.: [01:04:55] No, it's actually the site hosted by Mr. Tumble. That's the one.

Alexander D.: [01:04:59] Nice!

Alexander G.: [01:05:03] And that's my one per podcast!

Jonathan D.: [01:05:08] And people say I'm the podmeister! So Tumblr is kind of like, imagine Twitter, but with three times as many rants and ten times as many memes. There was like a big discussion on linguistics Tumblr about how we shouldn't talk about whether some languages are more useful than others. And from a linguistics point of view, from a kind of sociology point of view, I get it. But if you're an interpreter and you want more interpreting work with businesses you know you kinda have to be a little bit mercenary and go: Well, actually, OK, I'm going to be spending time in this country, I'm going to learn the language or "oh, look, I can see that in...". For instance, I would say: interpreters training now, if you have any European language, I would say it's a very very wise move at the moment to add either Russian or Mandarin. I'd say the amount of work... It's an incredibly wise strategic move to do that and especially if like in the case of the UK where native English-speaking Mandarin interpreters are like hen's teeth to find, you could basically name your rates. And so it would be a really good strategic move and there's nothing wrong with making a strategic move. Do interpreters in the Commission look ahead and go, okay, I foresee there might be a lot of work in... or are there some languages that aren't the big ones that are still deemed more useful?

Alexander D.: [01:06:34] I think the whole sort of looking ahead is probably done by our administration. So because they know what kind of demands come in in terms of languages for meetings, so they would determine on you know what's sort of coming down the pike. But I mean there's a lot of fluctuation of course in terms of demand for individual languages and that's discussed every year at the SCIC Universities conference. So if you're interested in that, you can go back and watch the recording from a couple of weeks, couple of months ago and see what that's like. There's one thing however where you have a lot of predictability which is the rotating Council presidency. So as you know every six months there's a new member state that takes over the helm in the Council of Ministers and sort of takes over the presidency of the European Union to some extent. And of course there will then be a higher demand for that language. So at the moment it's Romania. So there is to some extent a higher demand for interpreting with Romanian. Next up is Finland, for example, so there will be much more Finnish than usual, that kind of thing. And of course you know now the following presidencies for I don't know I think at least five years or so. So for the interpreting services they will already know to plan in advance in terms of you know booking freelancers, making sure maybe to train a few more people with that language.  If it's again a "smaller language".

Alexander G.: [01:07:55] But at the same time the question also came up when we did the London Met even Alex because I remember one of the students asking if they should learn a language because they feel it's strategic. And I get what you're saying, Jonathan, about the Chinese and the Arabic because it's actually very forward-looking and that's literally somewhere down the line that that comes in super hard and heavy. But you know I remember I think it was one of the students was asking about English. I actually don't remember particularly who asked what but I don't...

Alexander D.: [01:08:27] Go back and listen to the episode.

Alexander G.: [01:08:29] Exactly. Like if you want to know what I'm talking about go back or listen to the episode it's not going to be linked in the description box below. But it's gonna be on our website. And I remember that we were saying you shouldn't learn a language out of strategic considerations because you need to kind of, everybody needs to have access to the language in the first place. Like if it's just a language that you're learning because of a potential financial gain that's probably not really going to go well because you're not really in it properly.

Alexander D.: [01:08:55] In it to win it.

Alexander G.: [01:08:57] And also by the time that you're going to be fluent enough in the language to make a living out of it it's probably already going to be, that window will probably have passed. So I think that's a difficult thing to to kind of recommend to people. And definitely don't learn Dothraki because Game of Thrones is now over so that's done.

Alexander D.: [01:09:17] Yeah I think it's kind of difficult. I mean when I - Romanian is probably a good example in my case - so I started learning Romanian just out of interest, out of curiosity in maybe 2002 or so. And then you know initially the plan was for Romania to join in 2004 as well. Took them a couple of years longer, it was in 2007 then in the end. But I mean it was kind of foreseeable that there would be demand for interpreters with Romanian, not only Romanian A but also Romanian B and C, in my case. So since I already was in a Romanian course, it kind of made sense to sort of you know take it up a notch.

Alexander G.: [01:09:55] Like double down.

Alexander D.: [01:09:56] Yeah double down on it exactly. But overall yeah I have problems with sort of recommending languages or making strategic choices because I think it has become increasingly difficult. And you know for Russian and Chinese for example... on the other hand that there are a lot of you know Russian interpreters who also have very good active languages like German and English for example and same for the Chinese. So I'm not really sure if it's really that strategic a choice because it does require considerable investment for a European to learn Mandarin I think. Russian, maybe... you know.

Jonathan D.: [01:10:33] I think it's a really interesting one because you know the ideal is always to learn the language because you're passionate about it and the realism is that a lot of interpreters could get passionate about just about any language. And it is a case of... there was Inger Mewburn, who runs a blog for PhD students, was talking about how sometimes passion drives ability and other times ability drives passion.

Alexander G.: [01:10:58] Oh, I like that.

Jonathan D.: [01:11:00] And so it's an interesting one that you could... I mean I would say geopolitically speaking I can't see Chinese being an unimportant language for a long, long time. And I think I wouldn't want to put people off and say okay you're learning a useless language unless it's Dothraki or Esperanto. You know if you're learning a language that has very few speakers or isn't used a lot in business or in conference interpreting, then maybe your future lies in another form of interpreting if you want to interpret with that language.

Alexander D.: [01:11:33] Sure that's an option.

Jonathan D.: [01:11:35] But then on the other hand if you're thinking "I want to be a conference interpreter, I already have two languages and I'm really passionate about learning another", I would say there is no harm in going, well, what resources do you have? What do you see geopolitically or commercially you know and looking at all the factors together before deciding. It may not be as useful, that's the better way to say it. That should probably go in the final show. It may not be as useful for a conference interrupter to add Esperanto or Dothraki, but for someone who is a community interpreter, it may be very very good to add Pashtu or Urdu...

Alexander D.: [01:12:10] I agree

Jonathan D.: [01:12:10] ...because there is such a... And so it really depends on on the situation. And I would say there is nothing wrong with looking at geopolitics and commerce and saying "what are the, not the five-year trends, because by five years you might be...  What are the longer kind of 10 year trends, what are the patterns that look fairly well established, that you can say "Well, actually, you know, it's likely that the European Union will still exist in 10 years, it's likely that China will still be a big force in the next 10 years, it's likely that Japan will still be an economic force in 10 years. Those languages are going to be big."

Alexander G.: [01:12:45] Right. But at the same time I have to disagree with what you said because I don't believe that all interpreters could be passionate about any language because I've personally experienced that I could be not passionate about a language that I actually did learn because it was at my school and I was not passionate about it. So on that note, err.

Jonathan D.: [01:13:05] I just said "can", not "are".

Alexander G.: [01:13:08] That's it. Yes, that's true. Yup, you're right, completely right.

Jonathan D.: [01:13:12] So a little kind of admission here: When I left high school, I left high school thinking, well, that's the last French lesson I will ever do. And within three months I was in a university course with French. And this is the thing; so I have learned through time to be very very careful who I take advice from. So don't take advice on your future as an interpreter from people who don't necessarily have industry knowledge. I nearly stopped trying to be an interpreter because I listened to two people who had zero knowledge of the industry who told me something that was true, you know, when I was in first grade in high school but wasn't true by the time I finished.

Alexander G.: [01:13:55] Yes, don't listen to other people, do listen to us.

Jonathan D.: [01:13:59] Only listen to influencers.

Alexander D.: [01:14:02] On a monthly basis, that is, do listen to every episode, is what we mean. But going back to do Jonathan's French lessons. Alex, how do you keep your general skills sharp? Besides languages. Wasn't that an elegant segway into our next question?

Jonathan D.: [01:14:18] No it wasn't.

Alexander D.: [01:14:21] Totally non-obvious. How do we keep our skills sharp? Well, we have training as I said. So we have especially during the summer when there's less going on, we have a lot of training courses for both terminology, also for topics, as I said so you know these evergreen topics like fisheries but also new stuff that keeps popping up for you know when we expect sort of new Commission proposals, then we get briefings for that as well. We also have, what else do we have? We have training for technology stuff. So I do a lot of that. I have tablet training courses this summer for example, we have new ones.

Alexander G.: [01:15:03] Which you host.

Alexander D.: [01:15:05] Which I host, yes.

Alexander G.: [01:15:07] You should say that: you don't *have* tablet training courses, you *hold* tablet training courses.

Alexander D.: [01:15:14] Yeah but just as a way of saying that this is available to colleagues in SCIC.

Alexander G.: [01:15:20] We'll leave that in the description below.

Alexander D.: [01:15:25] What else? Yeah. And in terms of interpreting skills, stuff like that, you can of course do your own sort of deliberate practice, I guess. So not necessarily just working in the booth but that's more I think an individual responsibility. So I know a few colleagues as well who for example work with interpreting students. There's quite a few in Brussels as well. So they go to practice groups, they give speeches, they give feedback. And of course when you give feedback to a student there's always  a two... what do you say... so it's a not a one-way street but it's kind of an interaction. So you get feedback as well and you can of course ask your colleagues for feedback as well and just have discussions for example on a difficult speaker or stuff like that. But the actual sort of interpreting skills, that's more a personal responsibility. I mean for note-taking for example: I still do a fair amount of consecutive. But some colleagues never do consecutive. So there's actually very little point in keeping your note-taking skills up to scratch when you never use it. So that's kind of difficult.

Alexander G.: [01:16:31] So I have a question: If you do really boring like technical training, do you ever decide to SCIC a lesson?

Alexander D.: [01:16:39] What was that?

Alexander G.: [01:16:40] Jonathan got. That's fine.

Jonathan D.: [01:16:46] He was trying to do a pun on SCIC and yeah...

Alexander D.: [01:16:49] "Skip."

Alexander G.: [01:16:51] Jonathan got it. I didn't even get a chuckle out of Jonathan. I'm so ashamed.

Jonathan D.: [01:16:55] Can we just explain: There is one pun master on this podcast.

Alexander G.: [01:16:59] Yeah, okay.

Jonathan D.: [01:17:00] And people are trying to rise to him. I am der "Pun-Meister".

Alexander D.: [01:17:11] The German word for pun is actually "Kalauer", Jonathan.

Jonathan D.: [01:17:14] Kalauer?

Alexander D.: [01:17:14] You would be "Herr Kalauermeister".

Jonathan D.: [01:17:17] Herr Dr. Kalauermeister!

Alexander D.: [01:17:18] Herr Doktor... It's almost like the "Kellermeister".

Alexander G.: [01:17:21] I'm gonna go to bed, good night!

Alexander D.: [01:17:22] The wine cave master.

Jonathan D.: [01:17:24] The man cave master?

Alexander D.: [01:17:27] Wine cave!

Jonathan D.: [01:17:27] Oh wine cave!

Alexander D.: [01:17:29] That would be the "Kellermeister". Alex, are you okay? Totally not.

Jonathan D.: [01:17:36] Okay. Okay.

Alexander D.: [01:17:38] Maybe one or two questions, I think we are nearing the saturation point.

Jonathan D.: [01:17:44] So I was going to say when you're a freelancer, if you get some awful speaker and I think the other Alex will agree with me once he kind of calms down. We need to start doing some calming music over to him. I think the other Alex will agree with me that one of the great things about freelancing is if you get a really boring meeting or a horribly boring speaker (who's always given an afternoon slot, I have no idea why. And there's always the one where you're about to fall asleep. Anyway...) If we get something really boring, we have the advantage that we know it's gonna be two days. it's gonna be three days or, great, we've only got this person for 40 minutes. If you have a boring meeting, it could be that you've got that boring meeting for a week. You know how do you cope, and do you ever get bored of the speakers and go: Please, no more of them!

Alexander D.: [01:18:45] We very rarely have you know five-day meetings so... Sometimes, we have two days but that's kind of rare. What happens is that a meeting happens on sort of a monthly basis or a bi-weekly basis or something. Well you know you just do your best. I mean what are you going to do? When you go home, you complain you complain about it or you sort of bad-mouth with your colleagues during the coffee break. Far away from the delegates, ideally but... There's not much you can do about it right?

Alexander G.: [01:19:15] Has it ever happened to you guys when you go home and you complain about the most boring meeting you've had and then the person you're talking to just looks at you like in complete and utter lack of understanding of your actual struggle in life? And you're just like: It was so hard! It was so boring.

Alexander D.: [01:19:34] Maybe you need to educate your partner a little bit. My wife is actually quite understanding, she knows. She knows what it's like. Then again, my wife's also an interpreter.

Alexander G.: [01:19:44] I was just going to say, she has the inside knowledge from within the book.

Jonathan D.: [01:19:48] I mean that must be really hard. That's a personal thing, it must be really hard to coordinate having two interpreters in the same house, that seems insane. But one of the thing is...

Jonathan D.: [01:20:48]  I have the bonus of... the great thing is all my kids are young and there's no better de-stress than when you come home. So I had one meeting in London where the last cut, so the last two speakers were great because the one of the last speakers was on a topic that as a Scottish interpreter, I do all the time so I could have done his speech for him. And the very last speaker apart from the chair's closing address was on the de-facto specialist subject of my booth mate. So we'd finished on a great day, but the speaker before the two easy ones was the definition of boring and the definition of difficult. It's fine when they're boring and easy, but when they're boring and hard, that's annoying. I came back from that that meeting. I must have gotten home quiet late and I came back from that meeting and to realize that like you know I think there was still like one child to go to sleep. So still a child go to sleep I think when you get home and you still have young children to deal with, you don't feel like ranting anymore because your brain just locks into dad mode and everything just melts away. And if you've had a stressful day, the best thing I find, is to lie on the carpet on your front and just let your kids walk all over you. I don't need relaxation therapy, I just need to lie on the carpet and let my kids storm all over me.

Alexander D.: [01:22:09] Although, at least my son, he's almost a teenager now, so that's getting a little bit difficult.

Alexander G.: [01:22:14] That's a deep tissue massage.

Alexander D.: [01:22:16] Very deep tissue.

Alexander G.: [01:22:17] Yeah, don't be like that.

Jonathan D.: [01:22:18] That's a trip to the osteopath.

Alexander D.: [01:22:20] It's a fair point. I mean yeah sometimes when you get home you know you maybe you get a few minutes to sort of decompress and sort of switch modes and then it's back to bedtime routine or dinner or whatever and yeah you just put it aside and then usually once you get back...

Alexander G.: [01:22:34] I can relate. Like I feel the same way when I come home...

Alexander D.: [01:22:36] ...and forget about it.

Alexander G.: [01:22:37] ...and then James is here and like we uncork a nice bottle of wine and we just lay on the carpet and look at it. It's like the same. Yeah yeah.

Alexander D.: [01:23:18]  you know.

Jonathan D.: [01:26:10] Do you know, one thing that'd be really got to end with, because everyone talks about you know the institutional stuff. I think it'd be nice to end with - because I don't know about Alex G, but I made a deliberate decision at one point that I wouldn't go through the whole thing of adding another language and that I would be just, "just", I would be a private market interpreter and the more my career goes on, the more I'm favoring that to the point of shocking institutional people by saying I don't really want to do 90 percent institutional work.

Alexander D.: [01:26:40] Yeah.

Jonathan D.: [01:26:41] I think it'd be good to talk through our thought processes and what type of environment suit what type of interpreters. There's two things going on so I believe personally that there's a different environment for different kinds of interpreters and the more I talk to interpreters online and at conferences, the more I realize there are some interpreters and even some translators who would rather be employees than business people. And that's a bit unfortunate if you're a freelancer because a freelancer by definition is not an employee and is a business person whether they like or not. And so in my own thought process at the beginning I was just like you know I'll take whatever interpreting work comes but you know maybe I might have to add another language. I didn't add a second language, a second foreign language at school because I didn't really get on with the teaching of the other languages. For some bizarre reason. And I realized how much effort I'd put into learning French and thought, do I really want to do that again? Well I have to now. But then the more I did interpreting, the more I realized that when it came to things like AGMs and procedural stuff and with the exception of fisheries that kind of policy stuff, I got frustrated because the interpreting that I was doing felt like it was going into the ether and you know I don't like that feeling when you finish a job and you say to the rest of the team "did anyone understand what happened?" and everyone goes "no idea, but the clients were happy anyway." And then I realized I was much more happier in the technical conferences where you can see people are learning, in the kind of very commercial you know we're trying to sell product stuff and in the negotiations. And also in the press and PR stuff. So although you know if work comes I'm not going to say no if it's an AGM or an EWC, the work that I'm trying to win at the moment is the leadership stuff, the commercial stuff, the PR stuff, the sales stuff, because that's where I feel that my skills are best used and it's the jobs that I enjoy most.  And so there are some interpreters who, you know... I met an entire interpreting consultancy recently who specializes in EWCs and so maybe, I think there's maybe slightly different temperaments or slightly different backgrounds or passions with different interpreters that draw them to you know some interpreters love a good EWC. I would rather have a press conference. I mean let's leave aside whether there's such a thing as a good EWC, that's a whole other question. But you know some interpreters love a good AGM. I would rather have a live webcast from the Scottish Parliament. And so maybe would you two say there's a kind of temperament thing going on that interpreter's favourite jobs tend to align with their temperament or is it just you know passion follows skill, you know, they start doing a job and they realise well I'm getting a lot of AGMs for toiletries companies so I actually I really enjoy that because that's what I'm getting.

Alexander G.: [01:29:45] I think there's really something to that though: passion follows skill. Because I've been doing a lot of management stuff you know whatever it is like a supervisory board meeting or like a town hall with management presentations and I'm feeling that I enjoy those things more and more now. But it might also be because I'm doing them more and more, so you know like you kind of get used to the style of presentation, the sort of topics that they do. But at the same time I've realized that you know I've been doing this job for a minute now. I'm not saying that to... I'm not saying that for any particular way. Not to brag or anything but I'm not doing it since yesterday. But I still feel like in my mind and I'm aware of this sort of strange thought pattern I still feel like I'm sort of glamorizing the EU work in my mind because I've never done it, I've never worked for the European Union in any capacity. And so that's still on my bucket list to this very day to like at some point say that yes I've worked for those hallowed institutions whatever it may be. At the same time though you know I'm working for - and again this is not to brag, this is simply a factual statement - I'm working for a supervisory board for a billion-euro company that probably also shaped global political decision making. And I don't feel like that's like I don't know it like in my mind there's still like a gap in terms of the glamour of the job you know the kind of importance level maybe I don't know. It's kind of weird. I love doing the jobs that I do. But at the same time there's something aspirational. As a freelancer in my position as a freelancer about the European Union. I don't want to work there as a staffer, as a full-time, because I honestly think that at this point after the years of freelancing I would be utterly incapable of being employable anywhere. I am completely useless. But there's just something aspirational about the idea of the European Union I find. I can't really put my finger on it. Yeah.

Jonathan D.: [01:31:50] So what drew you to go for the European Union rather than freelance, Alex? Was it a kind of temperament thing if you like, order and organization and kind of predictability, or was there something else going on there?

Alexander D.: [01:32:07] To be honest I've never really thought about it all that much but I think it wasn't the stability and the order and the sort of structure because I didn't really know about that back then. I think I did glamorize as well quite a bit because at the university where I trained, in Leipzig, back in the day we didn't have a lot of contact with the European institutions, in fact almost none whatsoever. So it was very far away and seemed sort of mythical almost. I think for me it was really you know I was always very much in favor of the European cause if you want to call it that, or the European project and the whole idea of you know countries giving away some of their sovereignty or pooling it rather to you know to improve things just in general. So I think it was really just that and I may have done something that is not interpreting in the EU as well simply because I'm convinced of the whole thing being a good idea. You know just to put it in very simple terms. But then I mean just the way that I got into interpreting it just turned out in the end to be a good thing because I didn't really I didn't really want to become a conference interpreter because I had seen it in a movie or something; I was just you know I was good at languages and that was about it and I sort of happened to move into interpreting. And it's quite similar with the European institutions I think it just seemed like a good idea. And I tried it and it turned out to be something that I really enjoyed. So I think that's what happened.

Jonathan D.: [01:33:44] I mean it's really interesting because my earliest memories as a child is watching the Berlin Wall fall down and then the first time I ever saw interpreters where there were two interpreters on stage doing kind of like a sentence by sentence consecutive at a Christian youth conference in Germany. And I think from there I developed this picture of the interpreters being the people on the stage, the people were listening to. And so from that point of view, the invisible interpreter thing always kind of passed me by. And now that I'm working more in commercial stuff and you know, you always talk to the client over coffee breaks and stuff. I remember talking to you once about you know the relationship between the interpreters and the institutions and the people you're interpreting for and you seemed to be suggesting that it was quite distant. I would find that hard because as a freelancer you know we have coffee breaks but then we have lunch breaks with them. You know the likelihood is... In fact, I see no problem with the interpreter going up at coffee break and saying you know, you're talking about such and such, could you explain what such and such does. You know because there's always gonna be something come up that wasn't in your prep. But I don't believe you can do that you know at the Commission - can you go up and catch someone at coffee break and say "could you explain to me this thing?" or "could you go through what you were meaning by that again?"

Alexander D.: [01:35:05] Well you probably wouldn't do that during a Council of Ministers or you know the weekly meeting of the Commissioners. But if it's a normal working group, yeah, that would be fine, I think. We do in fact sometimes go in and you know if there's a sort of a very specific question... I think it's a bit different if it's one of those sort of ritualized, sort of regular events in Brussels, maybe not so much, but certainly if you have more of a one-off conference where you actually have coffee breaks, that kind of thing, then it's much easier to get in direct contact with delegates. And there are some differences as well between again the "bigger" and "smaller" languages because for example the Maltese colleagues or the Estonian colleagues there's a much higher probability that they actually know the people who are the delegates because maybe they studied together or you know they've worked together in some other capacities. So yeah. So there's maybe an even more direct contact but it's not frowned upon to talk to delegates and in fact sometimes delegates will even come to the booth and you know just say hello and "thank you for your work". "I was just curious to see what the booth looks like." That kind of thing; it doesn't happen every day but it does happen. So there's you know it's much more relaxed now I think.

Alexander G.: [01:36:22] And also at the same time I think you know especially in these kind of managerial settings that I was talking about earlier like it's very frowned upon to go out there and ask people about anything. Yeah, like, you could not just go up to the CEO and ask him about oh by the way how does this car work? Like, what's a steering wheel? You know what I mean? You can't just do that. And oftentimes even, we are completely separate from them, like, sometimes we're actually a floor below the meeting because of security reasons. Like sometimes I don't know you know we're just completely removed from them for confidentiality, reasons security reasons. So you know there's literally no way to get to them and we are very close in proximity but very remote in terms of accessibility. So.

Alexander D.: [01:37:05] That's a good way of summarizing it I think. Yeah.

Alexander G.: [01:37:07] Yeah. Thank you.

Jonathan D.: [01:37:11] That's really interesting because I think apart from maybe one AGM that I did where because of timings things were impossible but we would still have quite good contact with the meeting organizers but pretty much every meeting I've done it's been a case of you know we will have coffee with the delegates. Occasionally you know there's one or two meetings where at lunch time you'll make sure you're not too near the delegates so they don't lean over and go "can you interpret over lunch?". Apart from that you know it's not necessarily you know what does this car do but there might be some thing that's arisen that you want to clarify or you want to check. And certainly in my experience clients have actually really appreciated that we care enough to want to ask them questions about you know how you develop this or what the relationship between this and that is. They seem to take it as a compliment rather than as "oh, wheren't you prepared?"

Alexander G.: [01:38:09] That's true. Yeah. But I actually find that the I'm just trying to like think about the last few conferences that I was doing and I actually think that for me it's kind of the opposite that I had a handful of meetings where I could get to the clients and just like talk to them you know just like we had the same lunch area, we had the same thing. And for example like any AGM you were just saying like any AGM that I was doing we were completely removed from them, they don't even see us, they don't even know where we are. The audience, the board members were being web streamed somewhere so you know it's just completely removed. Yeah. Interesting, very interesting that it's so kind of... opposed.

Jonathan D.: [01:38:49] I think it also depends. Like most of the AGMs I've done have been for lobbying groups and they have a different... or associations, and associations and lobbying groups have a different way of working. In fact, I was at one technical conference that was set up by an association and the guy had everyone in the room doing these kind of Amy Cuddy power poses to make them feel strong and whatever.

Alexander G.: [01:39:15] The power pose. Did he do the victory with the two hands up, the victory pose?

Jonathan D.: [01:39:18] It was like standing with your arms out wide to the side and legs as wide.

Alexander G.: [01:39:23] Well you know in fact if you stand like this for 15 seconds, it changes the physiology of your body, I've been told many, many times at conferences. And you will have more power.

Jonathan D.: [01:39:35] He actually came up with... one of the local organizers who was gonna do this came up to us and came into the booths and he went "it may be difficult for you to power-pose in here," as if he was expecting us while interpreting to be doing like Amy Cuddy power poses; and we're know in the plush EU booths, I don't know about you, Alex. We're in the mobile booths that are like the equivalent of IKEA flat pack.

Alexander G.: [01:39:57] They're about the size of my first apartment.

Jonathan D.: [01:39:59] If you stretch your arms out too wide, you give your booth mate a black-eye. But anyway, that was an absolutely, a really fascinating episode. I think it's probably the deepest we've got into subjects of that depth for quite a while.

Alexander D.: [01:40:14] Quite possibly.

Jonathan D.: [01:40:16] I find it absolutely fascinating and I'm really glad that there's more to institutional interpreting than having to be institutionalized...

Alexander G.: [01:40:23] That was Jonathan's one per episode.

Jonathan D.: [01:40:26] ...and doing lots of doing lots of tests. I've heard so many scare stories about the EU accreditation test. It did sound like you know they made people go over you know like army-style assault courses and interview them about their parents' history. And are you a member of any dangerous political organizations?

Alexander D.: [01:40:43] Well I can I can just say that it's been great to get those questions for you because it's always nice to be able to reflect on what you do every day and to see it from a completely different perspective. So that's been nice. Thank you!

Jonathan D.: [01:40:58] It hasn't persuaded me to join the EU but it was it was a lot of fun and it has persuaded me to try and get myself invited to like Translating Europe Forum or the SCIC universities forum. If anyone's listening: I'm always open to free travel!

Alexander G.: [01:41:19] Dankeschön, Herr Podcastmann.

Jonathan D.: [01:41:24] Dr. Podcastmann!

Alexander D.: [01:41:26] Ja, wir schaffen das!

Alexander G.: [01:41:29] My wine glass is not big enough for this conversation.

Alexander D.: [01:41:34] I know, it's not hilarious, it's embarrassing but let's not talk about it.

Alexander D.: [01:41:43] There's two Germans here, you know, what do you expect?

Alexander G.: [01:41:46] Let's talk about the Wurst. This is the German.

Jonathan D.: [01:41:50] This is the wurst episode we've ever recorded.

Alexander G.: [01:41:52] Oh, I like that.

Alexander G.: [01:42:13] No, I feel I feel like we should just like very ungracefully power-pose out of this episode and just leave it at that.

Jonathan D.: [01:42:23] Yeah, I'm gonna hit stop now.