Here at Veritas we often deal with requests for interpreting from large companies who have experience with procuring these services.

However, many of our customers from smaller organisations may not be as familiar with the spectrum of interpreting that is available to them. This blog post is therefore a rundown of what is meant by the term conference interpreting.

Conference interpreters are required for multilingual meetings or conferences where delegates will need to be addressed in their own languages.

The term conference interpreting can be applied to many different settings, from a small business meeting with a prospective client to a complex event staged for 500 people.

Conference interpreting, and interpreting as a whole, can be carried out in a number of different ways, depending on the environment and type of assignment. In general however, there are two main types: simultaneous and consecutive, which may both be used in a conference environment.

Simultaneous interpreting may be the most suitable form for events where a larger number of languages will be used, whereas consecutive interpreting may be more appropriate for smaller meetings involving technical or confidential material, where fewer languages are involved.

In terms of information for students, the main organisation for this branch of interpreting is the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), which currently has over 2,000 members in o more than 80 countries.

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Welcome to the penultimate post from our amazing alphabet blog series! It has been a great adventure to discover what is behind the characters we use every day. And now here we are to the fabulous Y, so let’s have a closer look.

As you have probably noticed already, the Y is in the shape of a fork, so the French scholar Geofroy Tory thought that it was a suitable symbol to represent the choice between vice and virtue. In the AGESCI, the Italian Catholic Scouts and Guides, the symbol of the section of youngsters aged 17 and over is a fork, which is called forcola. Its two branches represent the choice that scouts and guides make between becoming a scout leader or leaving the movement. However, there are also several different places where we can find a Y, can you think of any?

Y is the only letter commonly used as both vowel and consonant in English. As a vowel, we can think of the different sounds of myth, messy and myrtle, whereas as a consonant we see y in youth or yearning. It also has something in common with its cousin W, as they are the only semivowels in English phonetics. You have a semivowel when a letter’s pronunciation approaches a vowel sound in the way it uses the throat and vocal chords.

Although in English Y is quite a widespread ...