Relay through a pivot booth at 185 words per minute
You are in the Chinese booth at a three-day water-infrastructure summit in Geneva. The opening keynote is delivered in Japanese; a Japanese booth relays into English and you relay from that English into Chinese, because no Japanese–Chinese booth was budgeted. The speaker is a utility executive who accelerates to roughly 185 words per minute and reads verbatim from slides that were never distributed; the organisers confirm the deck will be published only after the summit. He cites "2.4 billion yen, revised down from 3.1" and repeatedly names an internal programme, "Kaze-2". At 14:20 the Japanese booth renders the figure as "increased to 3.1 billion yen". You can read "3.1 → 2.4" on the screen behind him. Your booth partner is on a scheduled break and returns in twelve minutes. The session is being recorded, and the client's brief states that the recording will be used for an internal summary, "so accuracy of figures matters".
1. Do you render the pivot booth's "increased to 3.1 billion yen"? Set out the decision.
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Treat it as a number-verification decision, not a loyalty decision to the pivot.
- Is the discrepancy checkable right now from an independent channel? Yes - the slide is visible and legible (3.1 → 2.4).
- Is the pivot's version plausibly a slip rather than an interpretive choice? "Increased" for "revised down" is a polarity error, the classic relay failure mode.
- Compare the costs. Saying "increased" puts a false fact into a recording the client has flagged as figures-sensitive. Saying "revised down to 2.4" departs from the relay text but matches the original's own visual channel.
So render it as a downward revision to 2.4 billion yen, cleanly, without editorialising in the booth ("the previous booth said..."). Note the timestamp and the two figures on your pad. Tell your partner and the Japanese booth at the first break - privately and factually, not as a public correction.
Counterfactual worth stating: if no slide were visible, you would render the relay as heard and flag it afterwards. Inventing a correction from guesswork is a worse failure than relaying a known-imperfect pivot, because it is unauditable.
2. Twelve minutes solo, no deck, an untranslatable programme name. What are your operating tactics?
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Six concrete moves:
- Triage under speed. At 185 wpm on read-aloud text, the recoverable content is propositions, numbers, names and decisions; expendable content is rhetorical padding and repeated framing. Compress deliberately rather than dropping randomly.
- "Kaze-2" stays "Kaze-2". Give it source pronunciation and do not invent "Wind-2" or "Project Wind". Add a gloss only if the speaker himself glosses it in the original. Log the term for the client to confirm an official rendering.
- Attack the cause, not the symptom. The fix for read-verbatim delivery is the deck, not faster interpreting. Have the technician or chair ask the speaker to slow and to release the deck to the booths under the confidentiality terms already in place for the recording - confidential is not the same as unavailable.
- Recall your partner early by booth phone or message; do not wait out the twelve minutes and degrade. Hand over at a natural boundary, not mid-number.
- Consider a relay liaison at the break: agree with the Japanese booth a shared number sheet and a policy on figures for the remaining sessions.
- Do not take over the pivot's job. You relay English, but you may use the original audio and visuals as a check on facts - that is verification, not re-interpreting.
3. What do you report after the session, to whom, and what goes in the handover note?
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Three outputs, three audiences, no overlap:
- A factual accuracy log for yourself and the booth chief: timestamp, what the pivot said, what the original or slide showed, what you rendered. Facts and times, no adjectives about colleagues.
- A private word with the Japanese booth chief at the break, so the pivot booth can correct or at least flag it downstream; a public correction in the booth or on the floor damages the relay chain and is not your call.
- A client note to the technical organiser, because the client stated that figure accuracy matters for the recording and the recording now contains (or is about to contain) a boomed error. Offer a one-page list of figures checked against the published slides once the deck is released - after the summit, under the same confidentiality.
Handover note should carry: "Kaze-2 kept untranslated, pronunciation as source, pending client confirmation of official Chinese name"; the 14:20 figure discrepancy with both values; and the process fix - pivot and relay booths exchange glossaries and a number sheet before the first session, and relay booths get direct access to the original audio. Nothing about the day goes on social media or to delegates.