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Volume I
Section 1.1: Remote Interpreting in the Time of COVID-19

The new reality introduced new challenges:
• How do you socially distance yourself in a small exam room?

• How do you make yourself heard through a mask?
• What is a safe way to, for example, take a drink of water while out on assignments?

There are no ready-made solutions, but luckily, interpreters are nothing if not resourceful
and I have every confidence that, whatever life throws at us, we will find a way to keep
interpreting!

The story above poses many important questions. Who is responsible for protecting face-to-face
interpreters during a pandemic? Many interpreters reported struggling to get access to adequate
personal protective equipment (PPE) and to be considered part of the healthcare treatment team.
Meantime, many patients who needed interpreters at hospitals had to do without them while
overwhelmed healthcare providers struggled to provide basic care.

Though remote healthcare interpreting services has existed for years prior to the pandemic,
COVID-19 revealed gaps in healthcare system plans for language access as never before. As
a result of these risks, challenges and pain points, not only in healthcare but also in schools,
businesses, public services, conference events and more, overnight most of the world shifted to
remote interpreting.

The emotional impact of the early pandemic on interpreters
Here is the experience of an interpreter in China who worked both face to face and remotely during
the initial COVID-19 outbreak:

Writing at the end of week one of my social distancing period, I think I am finally able to
calm myself down to write something about COVID-19. What do I know? What’s going on?

The only thing I know [is] it started with a virus outbreak, now it is a pandemic. Governments
announced shutdowns. A lot of people started panicking. I am among these people.

This interpreter’s previous experience with having been so close to the severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002 helped her deal with COVID-19 in a specific way.

Early in January of 2020, I heard about people in China catching a kind of acute and
contagious pneumonia due to some ferocious virus. I didn’t know much about viruses (and
I still don’t). I didn’t even know the difference between a virus and a bacteria.

However, I remember the SARS outbreak (2002–2004) in China. During that time period,
I worked as a TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] teacher at a public high
school in a small but affluent town in Guangdong province. We would always perform
head counts in the morning and make sure that no one arrived to school sick. The school
principal addressed this daily. Put the right measures in the right places. No quarantine
was needed in our town. Lucky me, I was not in the epicenter of the outbreak. Before I
knew it life went back to normal. I wanted to pat myself on the back—I have survived SARS.

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