I HAVE FOUND A MENTOR!!! :D

        At long last and almost at the last possible second, I have found a mentor, thank God. Her name is Anne Guzman and she owns her own company, Guzman Translation and Interpreting. I met her for the first time last Wednesday at a community budget meeting she was interpreting for in Long Beach. These types of community meetings are the events she interprets at most often. I'm happy that it will work out for me to shadow her when she has events come up.
        This past Saturday was my first official day of mentorship (yay!). I went to a Building Healthy Communities event at Stevenson Elementary School in Long Beach. My mentor, Anne, interpreted for an info session that was part of the event. I listened to both the English presenter and the Spanish interpretation by my mentor. It turned out that she had to do both simultaneous AND consecutive, which was really cool to see.

Stevenson Elementary School

This is the equipment that is used for simultaneous interpreting, which I helped set up. We put it on a table near the door so anyone who needed Spanish interpretation could pick one up. Each pair of headphones is plugged into a receiver (the little boxes), which gets a signal from the transmitter plugged into the interpreter's microphone. Both the transmitter and receiver have to be turned to the same channel, so it's a little like a one-way walkie talkie.

This was the presentation stage in the school auditorium. There were a couple of videos throughout, which had to be interpreted as well. 

Here is my mentor interpreting for the person speaking on the stage. You can see her microphone in the picture. The people wearing headphones, like me, hear everything she says. I lowered the volume on my receiver because I wanted to hear both English and Spanish.

It was really cool that I got to see two different types of interpretation! The lady on the right wanted to give her portion of the presentation in Spanish, and since the English speakers in the audience didn't have headphones, Anne had to interpret using the consecutive method. First the presenter spoke for a little bit while Anne took notes (left picture), and then Anne interpreted what had been said by the speaker into English using the notes she had taken to help her (right picture).

I loved shadowing Anne on Saturday and I'm super excited to continue my mentorship with her and learn more about interpreting! All my waiting and hoping for a mentorship has paid off and I'm ready to take on the rest of my senior project. :D