Challenges old and new - an interview with the FAO Interpretation Group

 By Catherine Sherry, AIB 

This month, AIB member Catherine Sherry had the pleasure of talking to Giulia Gaviano and Laura Guerra from the Interpretation Group at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) about the extensive work that goes into meeting organising, interpreter recruitment, and the importance of good baking and sprinting skills. 

The Interpretation Group services FAO meetings at its headquarters in Rome, as well as in the field, into and from the six UN languages (Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian), in addition to Italian regularly, Portuguese sometimes, and any other language possible, upon request. It currently has 5 staff interpreters and a roster of some 250 freelancers. In 2019, the group organised 3,620 interpreter days at HQ, a figure which rose to 3,740 in 2020, despite the global pandemic. 

Q. When did you start at FAO and how did you come to be part of the Interpretation Group? 

L. I started in 2012 as a Temporary Assistant, then I moved to the translation office for two years due to internal rotation rules, and I’ve been back here as an Office Clerk since 2016. I was attracted to working at the FAO because of the multicultural environment – I’m originally from Guatemala and I don’t feel a “stranger” here, as I would in an all-Italian company. 

G. I began at FAO as a meeting messenger and became a temporary assistant in March 2019. I also enjoy the multicultural climate, as well as supporting the FAO mandate. I did my degree in Political Sciences, so I have an interest in international organisations. 

Q. What does your job involve?

L. Once interpreters have been selected by the Senior Interpreter, it involves working out how to assign them each session bearing in mind the language combinations, type of meeting, maximum number of sessions and mandatory breaks between sessions…it’s what I call the “sudoku” and it can be pretty challenging when you have five teams working in one week, but fortunately I’m pretty good at sudoku! We also field queries from the interpreters and the secretariats, provide cost estimates, and deal with an array of other administrative matters. 

G. As a Temporary Assistant I’m in charge of meeting documentation, so I liaise with the secretariat to request, gather and collate all the background documents so the interpreters can prepare for an assignment, and I work with our weekly assistants to create the document sets. When the meeting has started, we continue to make sure that the teams always have new and updated versions. 

L. Since the pandemic, we now also do a lot of work related to interpreter travel arrangements, such as regularly checking the travel restrictions and Covid testing requirements in each country and arranging the letters of employment we send interpreters to justify them travelling. 

Q. What would you advise someone new to your job? 

L. You need to know how FAO meetings work and what they entail, not only for the Interpretation Group, but also the many other departments involved in making a meeting possible – we talk on a daily basis to the colleagues who book rooms, and the audiovisual service, for example, especially now. The documentation side is hugely important, but fairly straightforward to learn: it’s basically a matter of print and run! 

G. We have to get to grips with the two internal FAO recruitment systems – one is general and the other specific to the Interpretation Group to manage options, offers and contracts, and above all, to expect the unexpected, because anything can happen at any time, from malfunctioning microphones to flight cancellations. We need to be patient, creative and calm at all times, and sometimes we have to be a magician and wave a magic wand. 

L. We’re never bored! The day often flies by, which is good because we enjoy a challenge. 

Q. When you are asked to provide interpretation, what information do you need to gather from the meeting organisers? 

L. Firstly we need the meeting title, which they often forget to mention! With that and the timetable and languages, we can start planning. 

Q. What types of thing can go wrong? 

L. ANYTHING! I’m very superstitious, so whenever anyone in the office says something like ‘tomorrow will be an easy day’, I know straight away that something will happen. I make a bet with Giulia that she has to bake a cake if I’m right! 

G. At the last FAO Conference in 2019, we had a military-style system to get statements and documents straight to the booths as they came in. We had two printers on different floors and four people to receive, print and sprint and it went like clockwork. 

L. I remember one year in the middle of August when I was the only person in the office and the Director-General’s office called asking for a Russian interpreter…in thirty minutes’ time! At the time we didn’t have a staff interpreter for Russian so I rushed over to the senior Russian translator’s office and begged him to step in as an exception. He said he would, but he was dressed in summer casuals, which was not appropriate. So I ran around the building until I found a man of about his size who happened to be wearing a blazer in the height of the Roman heat, told him I needed it for an emergency, and hey presto, problem solved!  

Q. What can interpreters do to facilitate your job? 

L. Interpreters sometimes ask us about an option they have, without realising that we might have forty others assigned that week, and we don’t know off the top of our heads what each one is doing! Also, there is lengthy process for a meeting to be confirmed that does not depend on us. 

Individual interpreter document sets, one of the many Covid safety measures taken at the FAO. 

Q. How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed your jobs? 

G. When lockdown started [on 8 March in Rome] the whole of 2020 was already planned, so the first challenge was to cancel everything, from the technical committees like Finance and Programme, to the Council, to the regional conferences for Asia and the Pacific, including flights and accommodation, and take care of reimbursements.   

L. We had no idea then how long this would last. We thought things might be back to normal in three months. 

G. After the initial shock, we quickly started looking at holding meetings with interpreting online and testing platforms. We held the first virtual meeting with 12 local interpreters working from the hub we created via Zoom in Rome on 8 April – a briefing on the Covid-19 pandemic by the Director-General to the permanent representatives. By 8 June, we were able to bring non-local interpreters to Rome, with the authorisation that the FAO Chief of Security has to give weekly for them to enter the building. The next challenge was that we lost two months of meetings usually held in Rome at the start of the lockdown, plus all the regional conferences, which we were all shifted to later in the year. 

L. We don’t usually have meetings in August, but this year we had a lot, even on the 15th [a national holiday]. 

G. We also serviced the regional conferences from HQ, and the different time zones meant for Asia and the Pacific we had to be in the office at 4am, and for Latin America and the Caribbean, we would finish work at 2am! In addition to documents for interpreters to travel, to work outside of the curfew and researching where to have Covid tests, we now provide individual sets of documents for every single interpreter in their own box, as opposed to just one copy per booth. 

L. Another challenge is that whereas in the past we would usually have a month’s notice to plan for a meeting, and at the very least one week if it was ‘last-minute’, organisers are now requesting interpretation for the next day.

Q. How are things now, one year on? 

G. For organisers, online meetings are easier and cheaper because they don’t have to arrange travel for participants, which means participation has also increased. For us it’s more difficult, however, because we still need to organise for the interpreters to come to the hub. Also, meetings very frequently overrun now, which I think is because for one thing the participants don’t get tired in the same way as they would when they were sitting on a chair in a meeting room at the FAO. It’s a lot of stress. 

Q. Are there any good sides? 

L. It’s good that more people can participate in meetings. 

G. Yeah, it means that smaller countries, experts, technicians, even farmers can join meetings that they couldn’t attend before because they couldn’t travel so far for maybe a 1-day meeting. It will be interesting to see if in the future we can hold hybrid meetings, with participants at FAO, but also others following and even intervening online. 

L. In terms of our job, I can’t really say anything is better now because there are almost no limits on it now.

G. Maybe teleworking? 

L. Yes, teleworking is OK because you don’t have to commute every day. 

G. Sometimes you can take care of some personal stuff at lunchtime, and quite frankly, I enjoy being able to lie in a bit longer!  

Q. Do you hope things will go back to how they were before? 

L. I don’t think we will go back to that exactly, because I have to say there are many positives in online meetings. 

G. We hope we’ll recover the positive sides of how we used to work, like getting requests earlier so we have more time to plan. 

L. And more travel options would make it easier, because right now there is only one plane from Barcelona on Tuesdays, say. 

G. But we’re lucky. We like our job. 

L. It’s stressful but we have a very good team.  

G. We kind of like each other, right? Almost all the time! Laura is a very good baker; I do my best, and Davide [the Office Assistant] just eats! 

L. Yes, and we have a good laugh about things…in the end!

G. We’re pretty lucky, all things considered. 

The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).