Entertainment Interpreting Services are different.
Plenty of agencies believe they can staff interpreters for production work and sadly, they’re very wrong. A portrait photographer probably wouldn’t be the first choice to cover nail the action sequences in a Marvel film. The same applies to interpreting. We all have a specialty and when it’s important, you need a specialist.
We’ve worked on sets and locations of three people and three hundred. There’s a few things we’ve picked up along the way.
ASL Interpreters and On-Set Etiquette
Generalists typically have no exposure or understanding of on-set etiquette. You’ll find with a random interpreter on the street, the interactions can seem odd for the environment. It’s because they’ve never been there, so it’s easy to assume they are not feeling the best either. For someone with a background in accounting meetings or doctors appointments, being thrown onto the fast paced set of a feature film can be complete culture shock. We see a vast amount of interpreters dip out of projects for other agencies in the middle of production because they can’t handle the schedule.
The motivation for the work is another concern. Interpreters who pick up work on set are often more interested in being on camera than they are with the production going smoothly. Our team vets hundreds of potential interpreters every year and have found the number one reason to not bring them to set is their craving for attention. We can work with new interpreters who are eager to learn. We can’t convince her she’s not better than Anne Hathaway and trust us, we’ve tried.
ASL Interpreters With Experience On Set
Often agencies will send an interpreter to an editing job without any prior experience. They complete the job and believe they’ve done well. Then we get called when the subtitles don’t match the signs and entire lines are compromised. We’ve been called to many projects just to fix a previous interpreters rookie mistake with a pickup that didn’t need to happen because they had the sign in another shot. When you’re unfamiliar with a production and what’s involved, it’s much harder to ask for the solution.
Easy to Schedule ASL Services
Finally, the most common headache in getting interpreters for set is the scheduling. Agencies rely on a one to two week lead time for schedule changes. They’re just not built to handle a midnight call sheet. So they charge higher by the day with insane cancellation policies, charging producers the same hours for a holding day regardless of the notice. The expense can be enormous and completely unnecessary but as a provider of sign language interpreting services, they follow their standard system even for the outlier.
ASL Interpreters in Production
We’ve trained for years on set and aided many interpreters in garnering experience from the very first concept meeting to the awards ceremony. Our interpreters are production experts you can trust. We also don’t have ridiculous fees or stipulations required in working with us. We’re great with flexible scheduling because this is what we do. When looking for american sign language interpreting services in New York or american sign language interpreting services Los Angeles, you can trust that we’re the right people for the job. We even provide american sign language interpreting services on location, anywhere in the US.
