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Episode 23 — Corinne McKay on Breaking into Interpretation
Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the Continuing Education Series, a podcast produced for the members of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association, offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the division. Today, we’re joined by Corinne McKay, who is an ATA-certified French-to-English translator and a Colorado-state certified French court interpreter based in Boulder. She also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College and as a full-time freelancer since 2002, Corinne specializes in conference and legal interpreting and translates for the international development and legal sectors. She has translated six non-fiction books and is the author of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, a career guide for the language professionals, with over 15,000 copies in print. Corinne also served on the board of the American Translations Association for 7 years, including as ATA president from 2017 to 2019. Welcome, Corinne.
Corinne McKay: Thank you so much, Andie. Thanks for inviting me to the podcast and hello to all of your listeners.
AH: So, Corinne never really needs an introduction if you’ve been in translation for any amount of time.
CM: [Laughter] How true!
AH: Her name has come up in one capacity or another. So, we’re here to talk to her today about her… I’m not going to call it a defection. Her expansion … of her range of services. As I mentioned, Corinne has been a translator for many years, but recently expanded into interpretation. So, I’m here to pick her brain and ask her what it was like to cross that bridge and wander into new horizons. So, first off, just give us a brief overview of what happened.
CM: Sure. So, I think the most important thing to say is that lots of people asked me, did you branch out into court interpreting and do this conference interpreting degree because you’re sort of sick of or burned out on translation or you don’t want to do it anymore? And definitely not. I’m still translating almost as much as ever. Actually, when I ran my numbers for 2022, I actually earned exactly a third of my income from translation, a third from interpreting and a third from teaching, writing and consulting. So, I think what really happened was I have always been really interested in interpreting, but back in the day when I started freelancing, I actually did a bit of what we would now call community interpreting and I loved it, but I could not ever really figure out how to make it work, because I have a daughter who is actually the same age as my freelance business. She’s now 20, but when I started freelancing and wanted to do some interpreting, it was just really difficult to juggle childcare for a small child and, in a big picture way, my major motivation for starting a freelance business was to spend a lot of time with my kid when she was little. And at that time before the advent of remote interpreting, the two things were really incompatible, so I pretty much shelved the idea. And then in 2018, I think, I was at the ATA conference, and I went to a presentation by Athena Matilsky, who is herself a French, Spanish and English interpreter and a pretty well known interpreter trainer and I had one of those “ah-ha” moments that I think a lot of us have in life going, I don’t have to do this, I can go the whole rest of my career being exclusively a translator, but if I want to do this I am getting sort of to the now or never point. I’m 51 now and I think I was 48 at the time. And to me, I think lots of people know that I’m a huge proponent of the idea that if your brain still works, you’re not too old.
[Corinne laughs]
But I had a sense of the time it would take for me to really pursue interpreting and thought, I need to either do this now or accept that it may never happen. So, I dove in.
AH: I have to say one of my pet peeves is when people say they are too old to do something. Trust me, I realize that can be true. Yeah, as long as your brain is still working. Someone said to me one day, in five years, you are going to be five years older, with or without whatever skill that you put five years into. And I thought, yeah, that’s right.
CM: Exactly. Lots of people said to me, the time will pass anyway. I’ve since said to other people who have asked me about pursuing a new career direction or going back to grad school and I’ve said, you’re too old to be an Olympic gymnast.
[Corinne laughs]
You know what I mean? There are things that you are too old to do. But literally as long as your brain still works, you’re not too old to pursue a new career direction. But for me, the sheer amount of time was something that I felt weighing on me.
AH: So, backing up a bit. You mentioned community interpreting. What is that exactly and did you have any other experience with interpretation prior to jumping in with both feet?
CM: Community interpreting is a sort of a catch-all term for interpreting that isn’t legal, medical, conference, and I think now educational interpreting is defined as its own specialization. To give you an example, some of the assignments I would do would be a French-speaking, we have a fairly large Francophone African immigrant population here in Colorado, so a lot of the assignments I would do would be things like an African French speaker is applying to be in a single-parent housing program and this person has to go to an interview with the program director and they need an interpreter for that. So that would be a classic example of community interpreting, which unfortunately, because it’s a really important service in the community, is kinda defined by what it isn’t. It’s not legal, medical, conference or educational. So, I did that type of work. And I want to say that I did a couple of assignments in a courthouse, but not what you would typically call court interpreting. Things like attorney-client conferences for a defendant and a public defender. Things like that. So that was really my only experience from 2002 until 2018. And 2018 is when I decided to work with Athena as a one-on-one trainer. My goal, although I did not know how much I would love court interpreting, it was more that I thought, I am not very interesting in medical interpreting, but I felt like pursuing a certification would be a good goal. So, one piece of advice I would give to your listeners, whether their new career direction would be interpreting or something else is that I think that some type of credential or certification helps your credibility on the market, but perhaps more importantly your own self-confidence slash imposter syndrome. I thought, there are interpreters out there who are completely self-taught. I thought that if I could pass the state court interpreter exam that would say to me, I can actually do this. To be honest, the first question I asked Athena was Do you think this crazy? What do think of this idea? Do you think I’m totally nuts? That was the reason I pursed the court interpreter exam, but then surprise, surprise, I actually love court interpreting. It was a nice surprise.
AH: That’s interesting. Is credentialing different in interpretation than in translation? In translation, it’s sort of the wild west.
CM: Right, yes. Yes, I would say it is both in terms of certifications and in terms of having a degree in interpreting if you want to be a conference interpreter. I think fortunately for people who use the services of an interpreter in court, there are many, many states, including Colorado, in fact, where it is all but impossible to find work as a Spanish interpreter if you are not court certified. There are, I don’t want to be quoted on the number, more than half of the US states use a common exam that used to be called the Consortium and is now, I’m not sure what they call it now, but it’s offered by the National Center for State Courts, so if you’re interested in that and if your state participates you can look there. Then, once you pass that exam your certification would at least in theory be accepted in any state that uses that exam. Then there are some states, oddly enough, it’s some of the biggest states like California and New York, that do their own thing. They don’t use the National Center for State Courts exam but I would say that, in general, I mean one thing I say in an off-the-cuff way to people a lot of the time is tons of interpreters are, sorry, tons of translators are completely self-taught and no one really seems to see it as an issue. It is, in my experience, in fact, the exception when you ask someone how they got it to translation that they say I went to school for it. Whereas in interpreting, I mean, perhaps because it’s easier to objectively measure what good interpreting is, I mean not so much in conference interpreting, but in medical and legal where accuracy is a big part of the equation, I think it is much more common for people to be court certified or certified as medical or healthcare interpreters. It’s a lot more common for conference interpreters to have a master’s in conference interpreting.
AH: So, you were already working with the trainer and obviously you’re capable of passing a certification exam. Why did you decide to get an actual degree in interpretation then?
CM: Well, my ultimate goal from the start had been to do conference interpreting. I perceived I think correctly, first, that I would be taken much more seriously on the conference interpreting market if I had a master’s in conference interpreting, that it would open a lot of doors, which it has. Again, I also thought, you know, I’m not 22 years old. I’m what you would call in the interpreting world a real French B. So instead of saying source and target languages, conference interpreters use A, B and C to describe their languages. So A would be your native language, B would be a language that is not native but you interpret both from and into that language and then C would be languages that you only interpret from, which are a lot more of a thing in Europe, if you want to put it that way. On the European conference interpreting market, you’ll see people who interpret from six languages into English and the only language they go into is English. Whereas in the US, that’s a lot less common. My guess would be probably because there are very few people who make a living in the US as exclusively conference interpreters. Most people do other stuff, and when you go to court, they’re not going to hire two interpreters. I mean often there are two interpreters there, because of the length of the assignment, but they’re not going to have one person going into French and one person going into English. So, I’m English A, French B, and I always tell people I’m a real French B. I’m not that person like in my program at Glendon, there were a lot of people who were French B, but were like “oh, I grew up in Montréal and I went to bilingual school,” or something like that. That’s not me. I only started taking French in school in seventh grade, so when I was 12. I was a French major in college. I did study abroad in France for a year, but I don’t really use French in my daily life. There’s no French-speaking community really where I live. My husband’s half Swiss, so I’m a dual Swiss citizen and we go there frequently, but I think for me I particularly felt like I am not that person who’s going to be mistaken for a native speaker of both languages. So, I really need this credential to show that I know how to do this.
AH: So then why Glendon? Well, what are some of the major programs out there and how did you settle on Glendon?
CM: Well, one of those silver lining of the pandemic experiences, and when I tell people the story, I always say the pandemic, it, as a thing, was a horrendous mental, emotional, health, humanitarian crisis and I don’t mean in any way to say that the fact that we ended up with, you know, a million people dead from COVID in the US is a good thing. I was very, very fortunate that no one close to me was seriously affected health wise by COVID, but here’s what happened. In 2020, before the pandemic, I sort of thought, OK, court interpreting is going well. You know, I’ve been doing court interpreting for a year plus and it’s going quite well. I really think I would like to see if it would be possible for me to pursue conference interpreting. So, I emailed Julia Poger, who is American but lives in Europe and is a well-known interpreter and interpreter-trainer. She and her husband run a course called the Cambridge Conference Interpreting Course that happens for two weeks every summer. So pre-COVID, in 2020, I emailed, or maybe even it would have still been 2019, I emailed Julia and said: I know that the Cambridge course is not a course for beginning conference interpreters, but here’s my background in court interpreting and mostly what I’m trying to do is discern whether it would be worth it for me to do a conference interpreting masters, whether I have the aptitude for that. Julia very graciously said, yes, as long as you know you’re clear on your reasons for doing the course and we are clear with the instructors on what your background and experience is, I think that could work. So, it turned out that then COVID hit, and the Cambridge course was in fact online that year. So, I sat in my office in Colorado and did the Cambridge course from there. Over the course of those two weeks, I think, the instructors, first of all, the instructors were pretty encouraging about my chances of pursuing a conference interpreting masters and then, one of the other people working for the program, not an instructor, but a woman who is one of their admin employees who works for the Glendon program told me, I don’t know when you’re thinking about starting, but the Glendon program has just announced that they are putting year two of their program online there. So, the Glendon program is two years. The first year had always been online and the second year had been in person. For that 2021 year, they moved year two online and she told me, I think you would have some chance of passing the advanced entry exams to do the degree in one year (which is something that a lot of conference interpreting programs offer, that it’s technically a two-year program, but if you have some interpreting experience you can try to take their advanced entry exams to do it in one year). So, this all together in the space of, I want to say less than a month, because the Cambridge course, I believe, was the first two weeks of August; I took the Glendon advanced entry exams and, then, Canadian schools start a little bit later than the US, but I want to say it was right after American Labor Day, maybe September 8th or 9th or something that I started the Glendon program. For me, it really was the opportunity of doing the program online accelerated by COVID that bumped up my timeline, because I think, before that, to your question, Andie, about what programs are there. There are only, so I really want (this is a whole other topic), but I thought, if I’m going to do this, I want to do this for real and I want to do an AIIC-approved conference interpreting masters. So that means that your program meets the requirements set forth by the International Association of Conference Interpreters, which is not like a certification, but which lends a certain degree of credibility to that program. There are all kinds of requirements that you can look up on the AIIC website. The point being that there are only four programs in North America that offer French and that meet the AIIC requirements. Really, my idea had been more like, maybe sometime in the distant future, when my daughter is an adult, maybe my husband and I will move to Switzerland for a couple of years, and I could do a conference interpreting masters there. That’s about as far as I had thought it through. Then, COVID, which again, I don’t want that to come across as insensitive, particularly to people who lost someone close to you during COVID, but I think the opportunity—the educational opportunities opened up by COVID—is really what made it possible for me to do it a lot sooner than I had thought of.
AH: Yeah, I think people know what you mean. I’ve definitely experienced silver linings, and tragedy doesn’t mean it was worth it, but yeah, you found a little bit of light… That’s interesting; so, it just all coalesced in a little bit of time. Did you end up completing the program in one year instead of two?
CM: I did. I took the advanced entry exams and passed them. Then I did the Glendon program all in one year, in the school year at the very height of the pandemic, so from September of 2020 until we got our exam results in July of 2021.
AH: What was the day-to-day of the program like? How often did you meet for classes? How much homework did you have? How many classes did you have?
CM: So, I did not completely stop working during the Glendon program. I did cut back a lot on interpreting work, because it was hard to schedule that with my Glendon classes, but I still translated and I still taught. I think the reason why that was viable, like without having a nervous breakdown, was that it was the very height of COVID and everything was shut down. Here in Colorado, we were fortunately never restricted from doing things outside. Where I live, we can hike and mountain bike and stuff like that literally right out the door of our house. Now we were fortunate in that way, but restaurants were closed; stores were closed; you couldn’t travel; we barely even had people over. We have a pretty close circle of 20-year friends in Boulder, and we mostly only got together with them outside, sitting in parks. The memory of that happily is kind of fading, but it really was that I thought to myself, OK, everyone else I know is watching four hours of Netflix a day; I could do that or I could do this program. So, I did pretty much twelve-hour days, with working and school. I did twelve-hour days about five days a week, and then I often did schoolwork also on Saturdays. Often my husband and I would try to take Saturdays off together and go hiking or skiing or mountain biking or something like that. Then on Sundays I would do some schoolwork and then utterly collapse. In the Glendon program, I mean, it’s sort of hard to say because the schedule varied a bit, but I would say between classes and practice I probably put in two to four hours a day of classes and practice and sometimes more. Then there were some days where we didn’t have class and I just practiced.
AH: What are all the methods of practice for interpretation? How does one practice interpretation?
CM: I think the main thing that I would compare it to, because it’s something most people have a lot more experience with, is learning a musical instrument. You’re going to do some practicing where you’re just interpreting and recording yourself and listening to it, listening for mistakes and listening for accuracy, tone, speed, following the speaker, are you sticking too close, are you lagging behind. Glendon has a heavy, heavy emphasis (which I ended up really loving) on long consecutive interpreting, where you’re interpreting a five- to seven-minute speech and you’re taking notes and then interpreting the whole thing back. I had no experience doing that. The longest consecutive I had done in court was thirty seconds to a minute. At Glendon, we were tested on up to ten minutes and we practiced, voluntarily, one of my main practice partners and I would practice up to twenty minutes of consecutive. That, I think, was the steepest learning curve for me. I did a lot of just generic practice sessions, myself interpreting speeches. Then I did practice sessions with other people where we would interpret for each other and then give each other feedback. Then, just like with a musical instrument when you do scales and drills and things like that, I did a lot of things like that. So, for example, number drills: there’s an online tool called Numerizer that shouts numbers at you.
[Corinne laughs]
You have to interpret them back or copy them down or whatever you’re practicing doing. I did a lot of targeted practice like that and then I worked pretty much an equal amount on my spoken French, because, like I said, I’m a real French B speaker. I don’t speak French in my daily life except for interpreting. I did literally hundreds of hours of listening to French audio and audiovisual materials and shadowing, which if any of your listeners have studied interpreting, shadowing is the first skill that you learn. When people are like, how do you ever learn how to do simultaneous? Well, the first skill that you learn is called shadowing, which is where you repeat after the speaker in the same language. I did hundreds and hundreds of hours of French shadowing: shadowing speakers with accents, shadowing fast speakers, shadowing slow speakers, all that kind of stuff. I did lots and lots and lots of that and all the boring stuff that all of us did when we were learning languages: vocabulary drills, practicing idioms, practicing different ways of rephrasing, doing stuff that is way too hard, practicing ways of rephrasing things, you know cutting down to the core message when you have a super fast speaker. Just like learning a musical instrument, there is always something to work on.
AH: OK, so a year of working forty hours a day. You do all the shadowing…
CM: Not a day. Not a day. I wish there were forty hours in a day.
[Corinne laughs]
Life would be way easier. But I’d say twelve hours on weekdays. Saturdays I tried to take off and then Sundays I would usually work half a day or so.
AH: Alright. At the end of this year, you graduate. Yay! Did you feel like you were ready to take on assignments right away or did you still have a bit of a ramp-up period?
CM: I did, because one of the requirements if you do an AIIC-approved conference interpreting masters is that they have to have very rigorous exit exams. The year that I did the Glendon program, our pass rate on the exit exams was exactly 50%. There were six people in the French group. Three of us passed and three of us failed. I think after doing that, I mean, if you want to look at it that way, it’s a lot more like the European system, where you get grades, but I don’t know that anyone would ever ask to see them unless you go on for further interpreting study or you want to do a PhD and interpreting studies or something. The real kicker is whether you pass the exit exam. The exit exam, most AIIC-approved programs, they’re going to have a fail rate of like 30% to 50%. I have that hanging over my head the entire year and I passed all four—you do simultaneous and consecutive in both directions—I passed all four exams on the first try. I think that was really the boost that shows you, OK, I passed all four exams for an AIIC-approved program on the first try, I really need to dive in and start doing this.
AH: OK. So you dive in. You start doing it. I mean, I guess you’ve been doing some of it before, but you dive in. You start doing it. What are some of the unexpected similarities and differences between translation and interpretation?
CM: Super interesting question. The thing that always strikes me, and I always use this comparison because it’s so easy to quantify, is the speed. Just as an example, I had to take a translation test for a new client a couple months ago. You have to translate three passages of 300 words each, so 900 words total, and they gave you four hours to do this. I had to go in person to their offices to do this. I actually feel like one of my, one thing I’m perpetually working on as a translator is that I rush. I work too quickly when I’m translating and I used every second of those four hours. When the proctor came to get me, I was still proofreading and thinking like, OK, I have to just wrap this thing up. So four hours to translate 900 words. Now, when you’re interpreting, most interpreting tasks for simultaneous are going to be somewhere between 125 and 160 or maybe, at the very outside, 180 words a minute. A lot of people, when you’re in a court or conference situation and they’re reading, are going to talk over 200 words a minute. I’ve actually interpreted a couple speakers who I think were maybe closer to 300. So, let’s give somebody the benefit of the doubt and say that they talk a 100 words a minute. I mean nobody does, but let’s just give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they talk a 100 words a minute. It would take you nine minutes to interpret what it took me four hours to translate, and I actually feel like one of my problems as a translator is working too quickly, so you’ve got that aspect of it. I honestly think, lots of people say this and I now agree: translation has made me a better interpreter, and interpreting has made me a better translator, because with translation you have that aspect of really, really, really focusing on the perfect word, what is the perfect way to express that. Interpreting, you have this real-time aspect, where, particularly in a conference setting, what you’re really trying to do is get the meaning across of what the speaker is saying. Like every interpreting professor who ever lived has said to their students over and over and over again, focus on the message not the words. Focus on the message, not the words. You’re getting bogged down in the words. I think, you know the whole message, whereas translation is very, very much about the words. I think there’s a lot of crossover there. There is the aspect of [being] separated by a common profession, that there are things about translation and interpreting that are so different. That was one of them, when I stood up from that four-hour translation test, I thought, wow, when you sight translate (which is where you’re interpreting from a written document, so you do that a lot in court settings, that they’ll say, read the defendant this plea paperwork in French). And I thought, OK, when you’re sight translating, you talk slower than you do in a normal setting, because you’re reading ahead and thinking about the words, but really it probably would have taken me less than ten minutes to sight translate what I just agonized over for four hours.
AH: I have heard interpreters tell translators, how can you sit there and just pour over one word for so long.
[Corinne laughs]
CM: And then change it the next day.
AH: As a translator, I can’t imagine just spitting it out there into the void, imperfect.
CM: Yep. Exactly.
AH: Going back to the pandemic. Do you think it was different for you than for other, more established interpreters to be released into the profession in the middle of this global shift?
CM: I do, because I didn’t have any clients. I mean, a few people have asked me, do you think it was easier or harder to start as an interpreter in the middle of the pandemic? I got my exam results from Glendon the very beginning of July of 2021. I think for me it was an advantage, because my only interpreting client was the Colorado court system. I had no private sector or conference interpreting clients. Because of that, I looked exclusively for clients who wanted remote interpreters, because in-person conference still was not coming back at that point. I had also interpreted online for a whole year. A lot of what was really hard, say if I had been my age, not to stereotype, but if I had been my age and I had been only interpreting in person for 20 plus years, I feel like the hard part about that is not so much that remote interpreting is hard, but making the switch. Whereas because I had interpreted online every day for a year, interpreted remotely every day for a year, if you did a lot of testing different tools and testing feedback methods and things like that. Doing relay interpreting, which is where, let’s say, you have a Chinese speaker who’s on the floor and you’re going to go from Chinese into French, but very few people can go from Chinese into French, so you have someone who goes from Chinese into English and then an interpreter like me would go from English to French. Relay interpreting online is easier now, because a lot of the main tools have added features, but back then, at the start of COVID, you had to hack it together. I think all of this stuff that was very challenging, particularly for interpreters who had been working in a booth with the sound technician for 20 plus years, I think those of us who started interpreting in COVID maybe had an advantage there, because it was all we knew.
[Corinne laughs]
At a certain point, the only thing you’ve ever known is inherently not weird, because that’s the only way that you’ve ever worked.
AH: So, you didn’t have to change your habits.
CM: Correct.
AH: Gotcha.
CM: Right. Correct.
AH: How do you balance translation and interpretation, the physical differences of it, working in a home office versus being on the run all the time. I mean, if you’re in court without a cell phone, a rush translation comes in, how do you handle that? How does this work together?
CM: I was actually in court this morning, before I talked to you. And I was physically in court. Still for me, I really wish that last year I had tracked the percentage of my interpreting work that was in person versus online, which this year, in my interpreting log sheet, I am doing. I would say probably 80% of my interpreting work is still online. In-person conferences, I really only have one client that does in-person work. A couple of my clients, they only use me for remote; I’ve only ever worked for them remotely, so there’s that aspect. Then, for court, I would say we’re probably 75% remote, 25% in person, which I have mixed feelings about, but it is true that when you’re interpreting for a hearing that is literally going to last 10 minutes, it’s not a great use of anybody’s time or taxpayer money to pay, because here in Colorado we get paid for travel and mileage. It’s certainly more efficient to have people interpreting remotely for that. I think everyone who is a freelancer has to sort of face this question of, does diversification make you feel like the risk and income flow and revenue stream in your business is diversified in a good way or does it make you feel like spaghetti against the wall, like you don’t know which end is up and what day it is and what you’re supposed to be working on? For me, I really like diversification in my business. I don’t set aside specific hours; people have asked me that, like do I interpret in the morning and translate in the afternoon; do I interpret on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and translate on Monday and Friday. And no, I don’t do that. Maybe my system is a lot more haphazard than it seems like it is, but right now I would say I have probably what for me is the ideal work volume. Most of my interpreting work is for the east coast of the US, so it happens in the morning. I’m in Mountain Time. So then I would work on translation work in the afternoons. I think it also goes without saying that the types of translation work I do or—it doesn’t go without saying, but you can probably guess that I’m not that person who’s trying to translate 15,000 words a week, week in and week out. I translate almost exclusively for direct clients, so the deadlines are usually pretty flexible. When I have clients who I know are going to need me for a big round of, let’s say like international development funding documents, I would try to accept a little less interpreting work at that time, but I think that, for me, that diversification works well. It makes feel like the workday is interesting. I’m not overly dependent on any one client, whereas when I first started translating, I had a couple years where one agency accounted for like 60% of my income flow. It would have been almost like losing a salary job if I had lost them. So, I feel like, for me, it works out really well.
AH: Is there any crossover between your clients in translation and interpretation? Have you gotten any translation work from your interpretation clients or vice versa?
CM: Zero.
[Laughter]
AH: Alright!
CM: Here’s your answer. I’m a talker; I like to explain, but the answer to that is zero. I guess I can’t say whether that is typical, but I think that reflects the fact that most of my interpreting work comes either from the Colorado court system, which has no translation work for French into English, or from agencies that only do interpreting, who I marketed to after I got my degree from Glendon or who I was referred to by other people at the Glendon program, but the answer to that is easy, whether or not… I mean, I guess I can’t really say if it’s typical, but I have actually zero crossover.
AH: Right. You mentioned that your work last year was exactly one third, one third, one third. So apparently, you love all your children equally.
[Corinne laughs]
CM: Right. I have only one human child, so that’s an easy equation, but yes, I love all my work children equally.
AH: Did you aim for that in any way or not aim for an exact split necessarily, but did you know, for instance, say well, I’m not doing quite as much interpretation and then leaned into marketing that a little bit harder? Did you have a hand in creating that split in any way?
CM: When I finished the Glendon program, I put it out there to myself and, for that matter, to other people that my goal for the end of 2022 (so I wanted to give myself a full calendar year of interpreting, because I graduated from Glendon midway through the year) that my goal for the end of 2022 was to be half translation and half interpreting. That part of it was deliberate. Then I just think online courses and online training have been pretty strong through COVID. I’ve shuffled around the kinds of things I offer, to some extent, focusing more on one-time webinars and master classes, rather than longer four-week classes that I used to do a lot of, but I think it’s just a reflection of that, that the split between translation and interpreting was intentional on my part. I’ve been doing online training for so long that I have the system pretty dialed in and I love teaching, so why not continue with that. Then, to my pleasant surprise, that actually turned out to be a third of my income as well.
AH: Looking forward, do you have plans to add any other skills to your career arsenal?
[Corinne laughs]
CM: Oh my gosh! Well, it’s sort of hard for me to say, but not really. The reason why I say it’s hard for me to say is because I think this is kind of a conference interpreter nerd topic, but, to work in the UN system or a lot of similar international organizations, UN agencies and things like that, if you have French and English, you have to also have Spanish. In the UN system and actually in Europe in general for that matter, they do a lot more of interpreting only into your native language, which is much less of a thing in the US. Pretty much everybody does both directions. So, I had to face this sort of soul-searching moment of, do I want to try to upgrade my Spanish? I took Spanish for two years in high school, but that’s about where it ended. Do I want to try to upgrade my Spanish to potentially work in the UN system? After a lot of soul-searching, I decided I just don’t think, for me, that that’s realistic, which is in no way to say if there are other 50-plus-year-old interpreters out there who want to do that, I am not in any way trying to discourage you. I also just thought, I put a lot of work still into maintaining my French and I love being a freelancer. So, I decided I’m happy with where I am right now and, who knows. Life goes in phases and lots of things can go in unexpected directions. My back-burner plan right now is to just keep doing what I’m doing for around another 20 years and then see if I would like to, I mean I love working and I love my job, so my rough idea is that maybe that would be my phase of just translating books and teaching or something like that, but that’s my big plan for the next two decades right now.
AH: Alright. Last question. Is there anything you want to say to our listeners?
CM: I can’t pass up that opportunity, is there anything that you want to say! I would just reinforce what we talked about at the beginning of the interview and what you said, Andie, that all of us have these sort of big crazy dreams or becoming what you might have been. For me, it’s really, really important to not get stuck on the time that passed between when you have the crazy dream and when you pursued it, but exactly as you said, Andie, the time is going to pass anyway and what are you going to do with it? I mean when I finished my undergraduate degree in French I thought, I didn’t even know what the term was, but I thought about continuing on to school to be an interpreter at the time, to go to school for conference interpreting, even though I didn’t really know what that consisted of. So, was there a part of myself that was like, good Lord, if I had just done that 25 years ago, I could have been doing this job that I love this whole time? Sure. But like my good friend and colleague Eve Bodeux once said to me, if you find a way to change the past, let me know, but otherwise all you can do is move forward. That’s easy to say and it’s a hard thing to accept, but I think it’s really true. What drove home to me the whole thing about the time will pass anyway is I ran into someone at the ATA conference in Los Angeles this past October who I hadn’t seen in person since COVID. Like a lot of colleagues who we only see at conferences, I hadn’t seen this person since 2019 and they said to me, weren’t you thinking about going to school for conference interpreting?
[Corinne laughs]
I was like, wow! That shows you how slowly the time passes in your own mind and how quickly it passes in the minds of other people that I said to this person, oh my gosh, we must not have talked in a while, because I’ve actually been out of conference interpreting school for more than a year. I already did it! So, I think that’s what I would impress upon your readers.
Just to put some numbers on it, I was by far not the oldest person in the Glendon program and I think there was at least one person who was more than 10 years older than me. So, I just think, programs themselves, if you’re thinking about going back to school, really have no sense of age discrimination or like you’re too old to do this. When I graduated two months before I turned 50 from the Glendon program, I think there were was at least one person who was more than ten years older than me. So, those are the twin messages that I would say.
AH: I love it. I love it; I love it. Alright, well thank you so much for your time today, Corinne, and for maybe planting some seeds in our listeners’ minds.
CM: Let’s hope, yeah!
AH: Thank you so much.
CM: Thank you.
AH: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series Podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for “Continuing Education Series.” You can contact the FLD at divisionfld [at] atanet [dot] org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/FLD or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho, signing off. Thanks for listening and à bientôt.
Corinne McKay is an ATA-certified French to English translator, a Colorado court-certified French<>English interpreter, and translator trainer. She specializes in international development, corporate communications, and non-fiction book translation, and in court/legal interpreting. Corinne served for seven years on the Board of the American Translators Association, including as ATA president from 2017–2019. You can find more about her on her website.
ATA Podcast host Andie Ho is a certified French to English translator specializing in the food industry. She earned her M.A. in translation from Kent State University and is now based in the Houston area. She currently serves as the ATA’s French Language Division administrator. You can follow her on Twitter at @JHawkTranslator or email her at andie [at] andiehotranslations [dot] com.
Transcribed by Crystal Crow, who has been a member of the ATA since 2011. Crystal is a Canadian-American translator, writer and poet. She has published poetry in the Eastern Iowa literary magazine Weird Cookies. She translated Marie Dupuis’s Etuk et Piqati into English for Manitoba-based Parenty Reitmeier Inc. Her current writing project is a lyrical collection of eco-fiction short stories. She lives in Quebec, Canada, with her two dogs and partner.