Chinese-English interpretation in the chemicals field

We recently had the opportunity to provide Chinese interpreting services at a chemical regulatory event focusing on Asia. The location of the conference was Brussels, Belgium. The participants were from the European and Asian chemical industries; most of them were from the regulatory field. Therefore the presentations were quite technical, specific to chemicals.

The interpreting went very well; however, we faced some difficulties before and during the event:

• In Brussels, there are only 2 English-Chinese interpreters who are experienced in high level conferences, so we had to book them 3 months in advance.
• We asked the Chinese speakers to send their presentations in advance. Unfortunately, the presentations they sent differed from ones they held at the conference. Although our interpreters were rather taken aback, they managed the situation very well, and no one from the audience noticed that the interpreters were actually seeing the presentations for the first time.
• One of the speakers proved quite a challenge: he spoke very fast (simply reading out his speech) and did not speak Mandarin, but some local dialect. The interpreters did their best to follow him, but they finally they asked the speaker to slow down and speak Mandarin.

Thanks to the professionalism of our interpreters, the audience did not notice these difficulties at all, and some people even came up to us to congratulate us on the high level of interpreting.

Our company only works with highly professional interpreters; most of them are accredited to the European institutions. This way we ensure that the quality of interpreting is very high and our clients are always satisfied with the outcome of t