E-ging Solutions is a world-leading Shanghai translation company with specialties in interpretation.

       There are a few professions that have an exhilarating and somewhat addictive quality—professional sports, acting, and politics come to mind. Athletes stay in the game despite their injuries, actors notwithstanding financial insecurity, and politicians regardless of the pandering and dishonesty around them. There are others,I am sure.
　　I am not just talking about a passionate commitment. Computer nerds get a kick out of lonely hours outsmarting the machine, scientists spend a lifetime researching a microorganism, writers take years working on something no one may read, while doctors and lawyers have been known to risk divorce for their dedication.
　　You will seldom meet an interpreter who does not love what he or she does. But, dedication aside, my emphasis here is on the intensity of the profession. In that sense, interpreters fall more closely in line with athletes,actors, and politicians.In interpreting there is a heightened experience for a 30-minute span, and then, after a break, you go back for more punishment.
　　On the surface, it would seem that the common thread between the latter professions is the public attention enjoyed by practitioners. Picture the hard-muscled football player waving to a throng of fans, the actor exulting in the empathy inspired by the character he or she plays, the politician spurred on into making bombastic promises by a cheering crowd. If only we possessed an ideal athletic physique, generated sympathy in the limelight, or could speak for ourselves while on the job! Interpreters have none of this.
　　Some interpreters may strut into assignments like prima donnas,demanding perfect conditions to perform, but this is the nitpicking of one who knows that a chink in the ice willfoil any triple lutz. There is always the anticipation of a fall—overcoming the fear of a fall, and surviving the fall smoothly, so all the audience remembers is a fluid performance.
　　Interpreters, like actors, have an audience that hangs on their every word.However, we need to hear every “crucial” word to make sense of the whole.We walk into a job fearing the acronyms that will stump us, the dates we may not catch, the proper names we will certainly butcher, the figures—here is a big one!—that we may shrink or expand, because the speaker could not be heard properly, or we were lagging too far behind to write them down.
　　It is this “all or nothing experience”—the difference between producing a nonsensical string of words and well-articulated meaningful speech—that drives and sustains us. Yet,although there is no denying the adrenaline factor, we are not just caught in a cycle of strain and relief.
　　There are blissful moments when we are one with the speaker, when he is so clear, well prepared, and eloquent that we can read him like a picture, and similes come easily in the other language; when we are perfectly in tune with the speech, its mood and emphasis, and can reach for seldom used words without any great effort. And other times—just as pleasing—when we are baffled, struggling to make sense of the words, and then something suddenly brings clarity, allowing us to infuse meaning into what we were botching. There are times when things go so well that we would not mind stepping up and sharing the limelight.