Conferences with a booth

What changes compared with the portable system

Here the equipment is not ours, and we say so in the first line.

A conference in an auditorium with a stage and a PA calls for an acoustic booth, a sound desk, an operating technician and receivers in quantity — usually hundreds. None of that fits in a case. We hire that package from suppliers we already work with, and it appears in the quote itemised rather than folded into a single number.

What stays ours

• The coordination. One point of contact, from briefing to close.
• The English–Portuguese booth. The two of us, not subcontracted.
• Staffing the other booths. When the event has Spanish, French or another language, we assemble the team from conference interpreters we already know, and we answer for their quality.
• The preparation material. Glossaries, speaker decks and briefing with the organisers beforehand.

Why it is always two interpreters per booth

This is not an upsell, it is standard practice in the profession, and it exists for a mechanical reason: simultaneous interpretation consumes sustained attention at a level that cannot be held alone for more than twenty to thirty minutes without a measurable drop in quality. The pair rotates in short shifts, and each supports the other with numbers, names and terminology.

A booth staffed by one interpreter for a full day is an event that will get worse after lunch, noticeably so to the people listening.

Sizes we cover

From a hundred-seat auditorium with a single language pair up to conferences running several booths at once. Above our own equipment, scale is a question of hiring and lead time — what we need to know early is the date, the room format and how many languages.