Why hourly rates don’t work for interpreting

I’m often asked to quote for events that need interpreting for a few hours rather than a full day, and then asked to lower the quote because “it’s only an hour.” I understand the logic. It treats interpreting as the time spent talking into a microphone, and that time is the smallest part of the job.

A professional interpreter’s fee covers a day of exclusive availability and the preparation that makes the day work. The hour you hear is built on several days you don’t.

One assignment, start to finish

A recent example. I interpreted at a two-day event on a new drug for ophthalmologic conditions. I had worked plenty of medical events, but ophthalmology was new territory: a real learning curve, even with a medical background to build on. Here is what the preparation looked like.

• Inquiry: the technical and logistical details needed to scope the job.
• Coordination: agreeing booth arrangements with the colleague on the assignment, since simultaneous work happens in pairs.
• Documents: the programme, the speaker list, the slides, and every other reference I could get.
• Research: the SPC (Summary of Product Characteristics) in both Italian and English.
• Glossary: a two-language glossary of field-specific terms, 333 entries by the end.
• Final preparations: last-minute documents, glossary updates, and a final review for consistency.

This one also called for extras: the anatomy of the eye in both languages, since the medication was intravitreal, and how drug reimbursement works in the Italian health system and in the speakers’ home countries.

Going by the file dates on my drive, preparation added up to at least three full working days, before I stepped into the booth for two days of simultaneous interpreting.

How the glossary gets built

The glossary starts with the client’s own documents: the annual report, the product sheets, the last few press releases. I pull every term that carries weight, and every word the company chose over an obvious alternative. A company that says “solution” and never “product” had a meeting about it, and the booth needs to know.

A glossary sorted from A to Z is a dictionary, and a dictionary is useless at pace. Mine are sorted by argument. Numbers and units sit in one block, because those break you under pressure. Acronyms sit in another, expanded in both languages.

Then every entry goes through my mouth, out loud, in both directions. Reading a term and producing it are different acts, and the booth calls for the second. If a term takes longer than a beat to come out, it goes on a short list for the morning of the meeting.

Listening before interpreting

A glossary gives vocabulary. It doesn’t give the person. So whenever I can, I listen to the speakers before I interpret them: a previous webinar, a recorded presentation, minutes of an earlier meeting.

A recording shows their pace and whether they accelerate when they feel confident. It shows how they build a sentence: some finish every one, others abandon one halfway and start again. Some read their slides, which means dense prose at full pace; others talk around them.

Habits are predictable. One speaker opened every single point with the same four words. By the third session I was ahead of him. (He asked how I was keeping up. I said practice.)

The last week has a shape

Seven days out, I read everything once and send questions while there is still time for answers: missing documents, unclear acronyms, whether a session is a presentation or a discussion. Five days out, the glossary is consolidated. Three days out, it goes out loud, both ways. Two days out is travel, venue, and technical checks. The final slides arrive the day before, as they always do.

The morning of the meeting has its own list: twenty or thirty terms that surfaced a fraction too slowly, names whose pronunciation isn’t obvious, figures that need converting. I rehearse them aloud before I walk in, hotel breakfast room included.

And then there is the part nobody schedules. A speaker replaced at short notice turns the plan into theory, and preparation starts again on a Tuesday.

Why the next assignment costs you less effort

Nothing gets archived. The glossary built for one meeting is folded into the one that came before it (defence is the exception, where each organisation’s glossary stays with that organisation), so a pharma assignment starts from regulated terms already checked, rehearsed, and used in a room. What’s new each time is the client’s own layer: their trial names, their internal shorthand.

The third assignment for the same client starts further along than the first. That continuity is one of the quieter arguments for working with the same interpreter over time.

What this means for a quote

Preparation almost always exceeds the event itself, whether the event lasts one hour or two days. A one-hour session on a specialised subject can need the same documents, the same glossary, and the same rehearsal as a full day. It also takes the whole day out of the interpreter’s calendar.

That is why professional interpreters quote by the day and include preparation in the fee. The hour on the microphone is the part you see. The rest is the reason it sounds easy.