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Newsletter

Newsletter December 2005

Nothing but cranes

The July Newsletter started with a report on the hive of building activity in and around Hohe Bleichen, entitled Nothing but craness. Now the building at Hohe Bleichen 11 housing SIMCONSULT on the sixth floor will also come under the hammer as we learned much to our surprise on 18th November. At present the plan is for us to move somewhere in the vicinity already in February 2006 and in under two years Hohe Bleichen 11 will emerge once more as part of the elegantly modern environment. Thatts how quickly things change around here!

Endo-Club Nord

Since 1999 SIMCONSULT has been recruiting the team of interpreters for this prestigious endoscopy event. Led by Professor Dr. Nib Soehendra of Universitttskrankenhaus Hamburg-Eppendorf and his colleagues, the two-day conference has witnessed a constant growth in numbers and reputation over the years. This year Susan Fergusson got up at the crack of dawn to do a sound check at 7 a.m. with the first-rate team of technicians in one of the interpreter booths in Hall 2 of the Hamburg Congress Centre, for the participants in the live broadcast in Ireland, Portugal, South Africa and in Sydney and Perth in Australia. We did not wish to presume upon any of the four interpreters to be present in the booth so early in the morning.

 

Endo Club Nord was once more a conference of superlatives with up to 2,300 participants in Hamburg, around another 450 participants in the various countries, not to mention several video transmissions from operating theatres in Hamburg and abroad. The technology involved in live satellite links for one and a half days is difficult for the layperson to appreciate. At such a conference the interpreters are faced with a particular challenge, because it is impossible to know in advance whether the transmissions can be understood just as well as the event live on site.

 

There are technical standards which must be met for video conference interpreting to ensure that the work is done professionally. Sound and image for example must be synchronised and, to remain intelligible, the sound has to cover a certain frequency range. In addition, the interpreter is dependent on the skills of the camera team. At Endo Club Nord the main language spoken in the conference room is German. This provides an exciting opportunity to demonstrate how language barriers are overcome by simultaneous transmission between German and English to distant continents in spite of complex medical subject matters. Just what the doctor ordered!

 

Three days with a Spanish beauty

In the second half of the year SIMCONSULT received some rather unusual and highly interesting assignments. One of our young, charming Spanish colleagues spent three days in Hamburg moving around in the world of glamour and publicity. For this brief period he accompanied Monica Cruz, the beautiful actress and sister of award-winning actress Penelope Cruz. Monica Cruz was invited to Hamburg by VOX to promote a television series.

 

The season of investments and funds - in German and English

In the second half of 2005 some of the teams we recruited interpreted at various investment fund events, including ADIG Spezial 2005 in the AOL Arena in Hamburg, for us a new and very attractive venue. Again in Hamburg three teams worked in the Speicherstadt for cre.net e.v. at their Corporate Real Estate Management Meeting. The subject at the Norddeutscher Vermögen event was also real estate investment and at the seven-stop GAMAX Broker Pool Roadshow the languages were German and Italian. Together with their partner club from Marseilles, the Hamburg Rotary Club paid a visit to the Airbus production facilities in Finkenwerder. Our esteemed client Berenberg Bank commissioned us to interpret French and German during the visit.

Exotic languages

For interpreters, exotic languages are other than those spoken in Western Europe. It is a sure sign of globalisation and the impact of EU enlargement that we are receiving more and more enquiries for languages of the new member states and candidate states as well as for Russian and Japanese. Among the assignments we carried out in the latter half of the year was a meeting for Montblanc with Japanese and English, Körber AG with Hungarian, French and Italian, Minimax Brandschutz with German and Russian. At the end of November we were asked by Airbus at short notice to organise interpretation for Russian and English, and possibly also German, for the visit of the Russian Minister of Economic Affairs. We were fortunate to come up with an interpreter overnight, even someone who could cover all three languages.

 

Risk deterrence systems

For the third time SIMCONSULT was commissioned to recruit a team for German, English and Spanish at the Intercon International Congress initiated by the Hamburg Fire Service after the September 11th attacks. The subject this year was modern risk deterrence systems. Emergency services from all over the world meet at this unique congress to exchange ideas and to develop a system of best practices.

 

Technology and medium-sized industry in Germany

Where would Germany be without this export-oriented backbone of the economy? Medium-sized industry is also an important client for interpreters. When you buy a bus ticket, board the bus and stamp the ticket you donnt stop to consider the machine you use to stamp the ticket. Precisely this technology however was on the agenda at the event organised by ATRON elektronic GmbH, manufacturers of ticketing systems, ticket machines, stamping machines, chip card terminals, on-board computers and passenger information systems. For the interpreter such assignments require thorough preparation not only in terms of content but also with regard to the terminology in various languages. Such was also the case with the frequently recurring topic of renewable energy, in particular wind energy. In September SIMCONSULT provided two interpreters for German and English for the Galeforce 05: course offshore symposium organised by Windenergieagentur Bremerhaven /Bremen e.V. in Bremerhaven.

 

The European Surgical Institute

We round off the year with an annually recurring event with our long-standing partners the European Surgical Institute in Norderstedt, the Colon Symposium. Nine interpreters, three each for German, French and Italian work for two days, mainly from English, but in each direction. All of them are highly qualified with many years of experience in the field of medicine. When George Drummond und Susan Fergusson see the images and video films projected at such seminars they are glad they gave medicine a wide berth from the start. Each conference interpreter has his own pet subject just as well!

 

Until next year

By way of contrast to our Newsletter in July, this newsletter is packed with news from the office (still at Hohe Bleichen 11) and from the booths here and there. We hope you have enjoyed the read so far and hope to reach you again next year with our next missive from somewhere in the same neighbourhood. As always our best wishes go with this letter for happy, peaceful holidays along with our sincere thanks for the confidence you invested in us in 2005.

 

Your SIMCONSULT-Team

You are looking for an interpreter or translator

for languages including Arabic, Chinese, English,

 French, German, Italian, Japanese,

Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,

 Spanish, Turkish or Ukrainian?

Send us an email or give us a call

Tel.: +49 (0)152 22 86 14 87

Ballindamm 39 · 20095 Hamburg