Every freelance interpreter at some point of his or her career runs into a new kind of assignments: teleconference calls. They represent a unique challenge to a budding professional and some of these telecons, without a doubt, are not for the faintest of heart.

You wake up at 4:00 am (California time) more or less capable of thinking and speaking coherently because at 5:00 am a client in the US (New York time) is going to be discussing the next big thing in deep space research with their Russian counterparts in Moscow. Or another U.S. client would like to address the subject of locating and disposing of hazardous radioisotope batteries lost eons ago in the snowy vistas of Siberia during the waning days of the USSR. Or there is a presentation on the cutting-edge antibiotics research to be broadcasted from Britain to 39 countries around the globe at 3:00 am (California time), a presentation that will be interpreted into 8 other languages…

Language pairs will always vary. Subjects under discussion will be demanding. For a few days, they can easily turn you into a rocket scientist or a medical student as you hit the books and work the Google machine to beef up your expertise and put your glossary together. For each conference call, the alarm clock will always go off at a different time: clients can be any number of time zones away so you quickly learn which remedy helps you wake up at just the right time where you don’t sound so sleepy (it’s a secret I am going to spill: I use the same kind of Oolong tea they serve to Buddhist monks before morning meditation). You also learn (fairly quickly) to experiment with different kinds of phone and audio gear to find out what works best on the technical side of things, and, despite all other variables getting in the way, can still deliver your spoken voice to eager clients with repeatable results while bringing crisp and clear audio and maximum comfort to the most crucial tool of the trade — your ears.

Even under the most adverse of circumstances (read bad connections, dropped calls, echoing or noise on the line), long hours on the phone teaches you what audio gear works best and makes the craft of interpreting that more enjoyable. Protecting one’s hearing is no less important — after all, you can’t just swap your ears for a new pair at a nearby transplant station. Well… not just yet. Undistorted audio, even with limitations built into common phone lines, serves interpreters well and is just plain nice to have.

In the process of tinkering with different types of audio gear, I became a bit of an audio geek. Not a bad thing, considering we interpreters always use some sort of audio gear as implements of our craft, be it in the booth, on stage or in the classroom. My goal is to share with you, my fellow interpreters, bits of this geeky professional audio knowledge I have learned along the way. I also secretly hope that you, dear reader, will also turn into a bit of an audio geek yourself — and find these tips useful for your next conference call.

Over the course of the last 10+ years I covered many teleconference calls using 4 distinct kinds of audio gear setups. Each specific setup had its own unique weaknesses and strengths, the former always pushing me to try something new and more advanced. I am going to briefly talk about each one of these arrangements in the order of their evolutionary progression and make recommendations on what audio gear, in my humble opinion, works best for conference calls.

My advice is not intended to be taken as a dogma: I am simply sharing what has worked for me over the years. Reader feedback is welcome, whether positive or not. The time is ripe to go a bit deeper into the technical side of things.

Getting technical: gear that worked for me over the years (and still does)

1. The cheap and easy ‘poor man’ interpreter’s setup — a working payphone.

Pros: It’s totally free, if the client provides you with a toll-free number for dialing in. Sound quality is acceptable. As an emergency backup, it works just fine.

Cons: It’s not always reliable as the receiver may have a bad connection to the phone and/or malfunctioning components. You are sure to get weird looks from passers-by as you stand there for an hour or so switching between two languages and taking notes. Clients may start wondering why they hear sounds of a city waking up in the background (street-cleaning trucks, screeching seagulls in the air and hungry sea lions on Del Monte Beach in Monterey).

Conclusion: Use at your own risk. If all else fails and for some reason you don’t have access to a basic telephone line at your home, go for it to get the job done!

2. Standard and the most obvious setup — a regular phone at your home.

This would be the most obvious choice for any interpreter, assuming you now get steady work to justify the cost. Not too much to explain here: you find a reliable working phone and just dial the toll-free conference system number with a meeting code provided by the client. Still, even this simple setup has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Pros: You work from the comfort of your home. Most corporate clients provide a toll-free 800 number in the US to dial in and connect for free, eliminating any long-distance charges to you. Sound quality is mostly acceptable.

Cons: Some conference calls can go on for hours — the longest one I have done to date was about 2.5 hours without a break. This makes for a very tired ear (it becomes red and irritated from the receiver being pushed against if for an extended period of time). The hand holding the receiver becomes uncomfortably stiff. Echo and delay are possible when several people dial in on international long-distance lines (it would be fair to say that most modern teleconference systems have echo cancellation; satellite links have become increasingly rare for international long distance — most lines are fiber optic, thus having very little transmission delay). You strain your hearing a lot because the loudness of incoming sound cannot be adjusted (or has a small adjustment range with the help of buttons available only on the more advanced phones). You assume a bad posture behind the desk because you sit in a half-crooked position holding the receiver with one hand, with your left elbow resting on the desk as you take notes with the other hand — not good for your spine and blood circulation. It’s pretty clear that there is a health risk involved if you do conference calls all the time.