Last night I was surfing around the Conestoga College website, about to sign up (and pay for!) Module 1 of the Interpreter´s Training, which is to take place two nights a week for 3 hours per night, and would have meant driving over to Kitchener twice a week. Today at about 11:30 a.m., I got a call from the Interpretation Coordinator at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, letting me know that I am being invited to participate in the same training, to be carried out by the K-W Multicultural Centre, for free! The courses will be held on Saturdays. I missed the same training last year because of having been booked to do the simultaneous interpretation for the Bolivian ex-Minister of Agriculture on the same day as the course began. I am SO excited and happy to be invited to do this in an alternate fashion. Commitments on either evenings or weekends mean being away from my family, but I think Saturdays are better than evenings, and making one trip per week instead of two is better too. Also, I will be getting to know the coordinators of the interpretation services in K-W, which is good, because I believe that work will come out of the networking opportunity. I will be taking the training related to domestic violence as well. Having the complete ILSAT certification is now a pre-requisite for working as an interpreter with the Multicultural Centres of Guelph and Kitchener, and no doubt any other places as well. I was taken on as an interpreter by Social Services of Wellington County before the ILSAT system was implemented, but it definitely looks like it will be needed if I am to expand my market and get more work. I recently found out that it is also required now for court interpreters, which may be why I never got a call-back for the permanent part-time court interpretation position that I applied for in Brampton in June. I still think it is very strange for the ATIO not to validate the training in any way. On the other hand, it seems beyond the scope of the training to examine anything other than theoretical topics, when they are training people from many languages in one course. I will find out soon enough how they go about it, and will be taking careful note of their methodology in order to compare it to the requirements of the ATIO.
When speaking with Wendy Greene, an accredited conference interpreter in Toronto whose language pairs are French and English, she told me that community interpreters are the poor cousins of the interpretation world. Salaries for conference interpretation are in the $800 per day range, whereas community interpretation pays a paltry $24.00 per hour, give or take a few cents, at least where I work. Conference interpreters work in half hour shifts, and in pairs to spell each other off, and according to Wendy if I remember correctly, a full day´s work is considered to be three shifts of half an hour each! Which adds up to....drum roll....$533.00 per hour. QUITE THE DISCREPANCY!! For what is almost the same work. On the other hand, to be an accredited conference interpreter, you have to have a Master´s degree...and the prerequisite for this interpreter´s training is a high school diploma, and passing a language proficiency test. I´m still a little muddy on my understanding of whether you can EVER be a conference interpreter without the Master´s degree. For translation, if you don´t have a degree, you can become a candidate for certification with the ATIO with a 600,000-word portfolio of professionally done work, whereas with a degree, you must assemble a 200,000-word portfolio.
The drawback to the community interpretation gig, apart from the less than fabulous earnings, is the fact that you have to piece together your work hours and in my case, I´m lucky if I get half a dozen per MONTH at the agency where I work. It´s been working for me as a supplement to my income, especially since I am a 5-minute bike ride away from the office where appointments are held, but I am not sure how much sense it would make to take jobs in Kitchener when the time comes, if it´s a 40-minute commute over there and back for an hour of work.
It´s a tangled web for interpreters in Ontario. Stay tuned for the next post, where I will delve further into questions of certification, language proficiency, and hoop-jumping!
When speaking with Wendy Greene, an accredited conference interpreter in Toronto whose language pairs are French and English, she told me that community interpreters are the poor cousins of the interpretation world. Salaries for conference interpretation are in the $800 per day range, whereas community interpretation pays a paltry $24.00 per hour, give or take a few cents, at least where I work. Conference interpreters work in half hour shifts, and in pairs to spell each other off, and according to Wendy if I remember correctly, a full day´s work is considered to be three shifts of half an hour each! Which adds up to....drum roll....$533.00 per hour. QUITE THE DISCREPANCY!! For what is almost the same work. On the other hand, to be an accredited conference interpreter, you have to have a Master´s degree...and the prerequisite for this interpreter´s training is a high school diploma, and passing a language proficiency test. I´m still a little muddy on my understanding of whether you can EVER be a conference interpreter without the Master´s degree. For translation, if you don´t have a degree, you can become a candidate for certification with the ATIO with a 600,000-word portfolio of professionally done work, whereas with a degree, you must assemble a 200,000-word portfolio.
The drawback to the community interpretation gig, apart from the less than fabulous earnings, is the fact that you have to piece together your work hours and in my case, I´m lucky if I get half a dozen per MONTH at the agency where I work. It´s been working for me as a supplement to my income, especially since I am a 5-minute bike ride away from the office where appointments are held, but I am not sure how much sense it would make to take jobs in Kitchener when the time comes, if it´s a 40-minute commute over there and back for an hour of work.
It´s a tangled web for interpreters in Ontario. Stay tuned for the next post, where I will delve further into questions of certification, language proficiency, and hoop-jumping!
