My first trip to China – to 2025 BRICS Engineering Congress in Shenzhen. So many impressions and takeaways – I can hardly cover them in one post. But I will do my best.
The first day of the Congress went as planned. Nickolay and me duly checked the equipment beforehand, met the delegation at 2 pm and started conference interpreting at 8 pm (quite unusual but fine with us). The setup looked a bit different from what we usually see at big multilingual events. There were 3 working languages: Russian, English and Chinese. To be on the safe side, the organizers decided on having 3 booths instead of two: ZH-EN, ZH-RU and RU-EN, that is us. This made our job easier, of course, since nobody needed to use relay or so we thought at that time. So we did our first day this way, the meeting lasted till 9:30 pm, it ended even a bit ahead of the agenda for obvious reasons I believe – delegates needed their well-deserved rest.
And yet, it was the second day that proved to be a make or break point for me and Nikolay. It all started out as planned with the Ru-Eng booth routinely going offline every time Chinese was spoken on the floor. But there was a tricky part, as well: It proved unusually hard to stay focused on the proceedings while our booth was not in a working mode. However, there were other challenges as well. At one point we had to take relay from our ZH-EN colleagues since one of ZH-RU interpreters had to leave the booth to help with consecutive interpretation at a parallel meeting and we had to step in.
The second day the Congress ended routinely at 6 pm, but, surprise surprise! our working day was far from over. Nikolay and me were invited to interpret at a bilateral meeting at 8 pm. “Nothing special, just another brief exchange of pleasantries”, I thought, sensing no trouble. Well… I was so wrong. That ‘brief’ meeting quickly degenerated into a heated argument that went for as many as four hours with everyone (and particularly the interpreters) absolutely exhausted in the end. We were interpreting consecutively, often taking big chunks at a time. It helped that Nikolay and me split sides from the start: I was interpreting into Russian and Nikolay into English, it gave us some time to breathe. Finally, we moved on to interpret in short phrases right after the speakers making the discussion more dynamic. When we finished at 12 I thought I would just collapse there and then.
To top it all, the following day we were expected to show up at 7:55 am and interpret during a guided tour. Our flight back was scheduled for 7 am next day, so we did not sleep the last night either. And yet, for all the intense work and hard time we had, I have all reason to be proud of what we’ve done and how it all went. Looking forward to more of such challenging (crossed) fantastic opportunities to come!
