Background
The client is a multinational company headquartered in Italy, a world-leading group in the energy and industrial fields. It isn’t the first time the client has used Landoor’s interpreting services, but in this case the project is three weeks long and includes a training course on the life cycle of hydrocarbons held in the historic head office of a Municipality on the outskirts of Milan, in addition to a visit to the training centre in the Piacenza area.
The trainers are Italian and their training activities are aimed at members of company staff that reside and work in Turkmenistan. Communication is to take place in Russian, the second most spoken language in the Central Asian country and widely used by the various ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union as a kind of lingua franca.
Landoor will provide two highly-qualified interpreters (plus a third similarly-qualified professional who shall remain on call at all times in the event that one of their colleagues is absent due to illness or unavailability). Given the complexity of the subject matter, the two linguists will take turns in providing the Italian to Russian interpreting service, swapping over at fairly frequent intervals. They are native Russian speakers and have extensive experience in translations for the oil & gas sector. They will operate as simultaneous interpreters in a booth using the systems provided directly by the company.
The challenge
After four days of activities as planned, an unexpected hitch: the room with the interpreting booth has already been booked by another group of people for Friday and for all of the second week. How to get round this problem without impacting on the quality of the service?
The solution
The Landoor Project Managers notify the interpreters well in advance and in complete agreement with them decide to use the bidule system – described by some as “light interpreting” and more versatile than booth interpreting because it is based on a system of receivers connected to portable microphones. More specifically, we decide to use 1 bidule with 20 receivers, 1 handheld microphone, 1 bodypack microphone and 1 clip. The interpreting is still carried out simultaneously (not consecutively) to avoid prolonging the service.
