“Voices from Above” tells the story of Eric Bauwelinck, interpreter and owner of Mastervoice, an international interpreting business, and focuses on his personal journey from onsite to online interpreting.

This book is not only about the future and current market in conference interpreting and the major transformation brought about by video remote interpreting. It also contains many tips for novices and experienced conference interpreters as well as for buyers and recruiters dealing with interpreting services in the meetings market.

It is inspired by Eric Bauwelinck’s own self-made career path, from a community interpreter to a business and conference interpreter, and currently a consultant interpreter organizing interpreting teams with interpreter technology at international meetings. Eric Bauwelinck has been pioneering cloud interpreting since 2010.

In the first chapters of “Voices from Above”, Eric Bauwelinck takes the reader on a personal journey from his first steps as a community interpreter to his first experiences in an interpreting booth – a workplace of one square metre with a small table and a plexiglass window. “My first experience was both challenging and rewarding, and so was the second, and the one after that. It became an adrenalin rush, an addiction – an addiction that will probably last until I retire.”

In “Voices from Above”, the author shares numerous tips: tips to get you launched as a conference interpreter “provided you have what it takes”, tips for branding yourself as an interpreter or an interpreting business, tips on how to join new online collaborative platforms, effective survival techniques, and tactics to use if you run into difficulties that undermine your performance or credibility as a professional conference interpreter, tips enabling meetings organisers to achieve a return on investment from simultaneous interpreting, tips for professional recruiters on how to reduce the stress levels of conference interpreters, and guidelines for professional speakers at meetings using simultaneous interpreting.

In his book, the author shares his vision for interpreting, his key values in terms of business ethics for interpreting assignments and, of course, his vision for the interpreting booth of the future and technology-assisted human interpreting.

Eric Bauwelinck is convinced that the expanding global market, the shift of old-school competition to new collaborative business, the crowdsourcing of specialised language services, the web-based sharing of language expertise, the Internet of Things, and big data will force both language service providers and linguists into new business models that are only a click or a tap away, offering new job opportunities with global customers who want instant language services.

Can old-school competition in the language industry transform into a shared economy with resources beneficial to all stakeholders in the market for professional language services? Time will tell.

ISBN: 9781535308137

 

Visit www.voicesfromabove.com for more information on the book and on the author

 

Visit www.mastervoice.eu for more information about video remote interpreting

 

Read all about “Voices from Above” on The Language Industry website

 

Interview

Click the play button below to listen to the interview with Eric Bauwelinck on the LIAs Top 100 Live Countdown Show (May 2017, interview in Dutch).