We had a bit of a shock yesterday, it isn’t that uncommon for customers to phone up unsure of the difference between translation services and interpreting services, but we were contacted by a representative of a large national translation agency who confused the two! We find this quite worrying, as even basic staff induction for translation agency employees should explain the difference between these two areas of work. The agency were looking to speak to other translation agencies about collaboration on larger interpreting contracts, except they hadn’t briefed their member of staff properly. We were given the impression that they wanted to talk to us about collaboration in delivering translation services, which is fundamentally different. So what’s the difference? Interpreting is the spoken skill of conveying what one person is saying in one language, and giving the meaning in another language. Interpreting can be done in several ways, for example conference interpreting, where the interpreter sits in a booth, and people can listen in on headphones, telephone, where the interpreter is present in a telephone conference, or consecutive, where one person speaks, and then the interpreter interprets. By contrast, translation is working with written material, whatever the format. A document is thereofre translated from one language to another, or as with much of our work, may be translated into a number of languages. This is a very brief explanation, more information can be found on our dedicated pages about interpreting services, and translation services.

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