Danish AIIC interpreter
Sara Høyrup works into her Danish native tongue and retour into English and Spanish. She is trained in her retour languages as a philologist and with a European Master's in Conference Interpreting from CBS, as well as a political journalist Master's from a Barcelona university. She is a member of AIIC and an EU-certified ACI. She works all over Europe and beyond. She has lived half her adult life in Barcelona and Seville, Spain. Her current professional domicile is Copenhagen. Sara Høyrup also works from Catalan and German, Swedish and Norwegian, French and Italian. This Danish AIIC interpreter can organise the whole team of simultaneous interpreters in any language combination you need, as well as the necessary technical interpreting equipment. She runs the interpreting agency Tolkene.dk | Interpreters.dk since 2011. She was a legal interpreter in Spain, Denmark and Sweden for 15 years.
Contact Danish AIIC interpreter
Sara Høyrup is a Danish member of AIIC: the elite international organisation for conference interpreters. She also belongs to the local Danish court interpreters' association and Spanish Asetrad.
This Danish AIIC interpreter offers three active and six passive languages for day jobs as a simultaneous interpreter as well as a consecutive interpreter. She works from most Germanic and Latin languages.
Sara Høyrup is a seasoned interpreting organizer and interpreting teams manager liaising with the event organisers during the meeting, while also working as an interpreter on one of the teams. We call it "chef d'équipe" in industry jargon, because French used to be our lingua franca.
INTERPRETING AGENCY INTERPRETERS.DK
Since 2011, Sara Høyrup has owned and run her own conference interpreting agency. Tolkene.dk | Interpreters.dk specialises in delivering high-end interpreters across Europe and beyond. She can help even with short notice, although it is always preferable to book your consecutive or simultaneous interpreters months in advance.
Through this Danish AIIC interpreter, you can book entire language teams of AIIC interpreters and other qualified conference interpreters —including sworn interpreters for legal proceedings–— for your professional meeting or event.
EMCI & ACI at EU: QUALIFIED AND CERTIFIED
Sara Høyrup earned a European Master's degree in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) from Copenhagen Business School in 2010 with a retour into English and retour training into Spanish.
She is also an EU-certified interpreter on the Danish interpreting team at the European institutions. In 2012, she passed the highly demanding ACI entrance test, both as a simultaneous interpreter and a consecutive interpreter from English and Spanish and later Swedish.
Sara Høyrup has worked for 14 years as an auxiliary conference interpreter (ACI) for the European institutions. For the past four years, she has worked the equivalent of full-time, namely about a hundred work days a year at the European Parliament as an on-call ACI.
SPANISH DURING DANISH PRESIDENCIES
During the recent Danish EU presidency, Sara Høyrup worked at the EU Council —from English, Spanish, Swedish, Catalan, German, and retour into English— at Council meetings and press briefings. She was also tasked with interpreting doorstep interview with the media.
In the same period, she provided the Spanish delegation's teams of simultaneous interpreters for all the inter-parliamentarian meetings in Denmark. She organised the teams through her agency Tolkene.dk | Interpreters.dk.
In these meetings, she functioned as a simultaneous interpreter into Spanish from Danish and English, French and Italian for the delegates from the two houses in Spain's parliament and as a consecutive interpreter at a high-level bilateral meeting between Spain and another EU member state.
During the previous Danish presidency, Sara Høyrup served as the liaison interpreter at a bilateral meeting between the British and the Spanish ministers of justice.
RECENT WORK BETWEEN DANISH & ENGLISH
This year, Sara Høyrup provided remote consecutive interpreting (RCI) from American English into Danish for a technical training session carried out in the US. It was recorded in Danish and used for staff in all gyms belonging to a market-domineering fitness chain.
She worked as a simultaneous interpreter from Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian into English at an internal corporate event for Good Food Group managers in Jutland.
At a meeting between local managers and the European leadership of a damage service firm, Sara Høyrup worked consecutively as the liaison interpreter between Danish and English.
Currently, she is preparing the Danish into English simultaneous interpreting at a union assembly to be held by the Central Association of Armed Forces Personnel. She brings along an interpreter colleague with a background as a military linguist.
DOUBLE PHILOLOGIST & MULTILINGUAL TRANSLATOR
Sara Høyrup earned a BA in 2000 and an MA in 2002 in both Spanish and English language and literature from Copenhagen University. She specialized in literary translation. Prior to that, she took four years of Spanish, British, and North-American literature studies at Universitat de Barcelona with top grades.
Subsequently, she worked for a decade as a newspaper translator into Danish from German, Norwegian, Swedish, English, Spanish, and French for five acclaimed Danish media outlets including Weekendavisen and the Danish Christian Daily.
Since 1999, Sara Høyrup has also translated several novels and non-fiction books into Danish, Spanish, and English, including from Catalan and dialectal Norwegian. She continues to provide AI-free translation of all types of text, believing firmly in the human mind's superior creative capacity anchored in a life experience that machines cannot copy.
An example: a theatre translator using generative AI translated the Catalan term "ingresos" as "incomes", although in context it clearly meant "[psychiatric] hospitalisations". This glitch changed the entire meaning of the text.
Sara Høyrup spent the pandemic running a huge translation project for Gyldendal, the Danish literary publishing giant. She found and chose, trained and ran a large team of Spanish translators and editors, proofreaders and quality controllers. Her task was to ensure the literary translation of 68 Danish and Swedish novels into Spanish in only two years for use as audio books.
SPECIALISED IN CATALAN POLITICS
Sara Høyrup studied for a multilingual Master's degree in international journalism at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona in the wake of the Catalanist secession attempt. She studied political content in Spanish and Catalan, French and English in a polarised environment.
For years, she covered the Catalan conflict intensely for Danish media. She used her profound knowledge of its background to explain the drama to a bewildered audience back in Denmark: an audience otherwise under-informed by a press that had bought into a propaganda narrative for the lack of in-depth knowledge of (and interest in) Spanish affairs.
Sara Høyrup wrote counter stories for years on end to set the record straight on a region she knows inside out. She wrote about the clash between populist regional supremacists in the rebellious camp and (not only the powers of the State but also) half the Catalan population in the anti-rebellion camp.
She interviewed pundits, locals, and expats in Spanish and Catalan, French and English. In 2017 prior to the vote on independence, she immediately came to be the foremost Danish expert on Catalan matters, informing and debating in Danish media.
Sara Høyrup organised study visits to both sides of the divide for Danish highschools and associations, interpreting presentations from Catalan, Spanish and English into Danish. She herself gave talks on the Catalan conundrum at Danish highschools and libraries, along with organising highschool exchange visits.
She translated and published a book in Danish on the divided Catalan soul. She gave it the title "De andre catalanere": The Other Catalans. She prepped Danish pundits taking a stand on the issue.
THE SPANISH CONNECTION
As the pandemic finally waned and the world opened up again, Sara Høyrup organized an EU-funded presentation tour with a Spanish migration expert. She interviewed him in front of the students and interpreted his answers at Danish universities and highschools all over Denmark.
She follows the current developments in Spain closely. This includes the backlash both in Spain and abroad, as irregular migrants are finally getting work permits that will make it more difficult to exploit them and allow them to travel back across borders to see their families.
At Roskilde University, Sara Høyrup studied International Culture Studies in German in the early nineties. She did film studies in Spanish at Universidad de Sevilla in 1995 and before that in English at the Danish Film College. She also received Danish training in teaching adults from 2015 to 2016.
TRAVELLING INTERPRETER
This Danish AIIC interpreter has lived in both Denmark and Spain, travelling between her homes in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Seville, and the EU cities Brussels and Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and wherever else work took her across Denmark and Europe
Sara Høyrup is willing and able to travel anywhere for both short and longterm interpreting assignments. Even at short notice.
Questions
What languages do you interpret into?
I interpret in real time into Danish, English, and Spanish.
What languages do you interpret from?
I interpret in all directions between Danish, English, and Spanish.
I interpret into Danish from German.
I interpret into Danish and English from Swedish and (New) Norwegian.
I interpret into Danish and Spanish from Catalan, French and Italian.
I interpret into Danish from German.
I interpret into Danish and English from Swedish and (New) Norwegian.
I interpret into Danish and Spanish from Catalan, French and Italian.
What are your ABC-languages? (mother tongue, active and passive languages)
A: Danish (my native language that I grew up with)
B: English, Spanish (my active languages that I studied in-depth and also work into)
C: German, Swedish, (New) Norwegian, Catalan, French, Italian (passive languages that I only work from)
B: English, Spanish (my active languages that I studied in-depth and also work into)
C: German, Swedish, (New) Norwegian, Catalan, French, Italian (passive languages that I only work from)
Where did you train to become a simultaneous interpreter?
I earned a European Master's degree in Conference Interpreting from Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark in 2010. I sat exams into Danish from Spanish and English, and retour from Danish into English. I also trained retour from Danish into Spanish, but we were only allowed to sit a retour exam into one foreign language.
How were you certified as a simultaneous interpreter?
I was certified by the European Union's interpreting directorates (EU Parliament and SCIC) in 2012. This put me on the list of EU ACIs: auxiliary conference interpreters at the European institutions. I was tested in Spanish and English, and later Swedish, as both a simultaneous interpreter and a consecutive interpreter.
Do you have other types of interpreting experience?
I do indeed. I worked 15 years as an on-call court, police, and asylum-case interpreter in Catalonia, Denmark, and Sweden. And I interpreted several safety and calculation courses for riggers, when the second round of the Copenhagen Metro was built, and a three weeks course into English for building crane workers at Siemens.
Since 2011, I have worked all over the private market in Europe for a wide range of companies and organisations. By private market, conference interpreters mean work outside the public institutions.
Since 2011, I have worked all over the private market in Europe for a wide range of companies and organisations. By private market, conference interpreters mean work outside the public institutions.
What does it mean to be an AIIC interpreter?
Becoming a member of AIIC is the absolute quality stamp in the conference interpreting profession. The system works with sponsors: veteran interpreters who assess your interpreting product and your professional ethics.
It can take a long time from you start working with a language combination, before you add it at AIIC and it shows up at your profile there. This is because you need vast experience in each language combination prior to adding it to your AIIC profile.
AIIC interpreters work mostly as simultaneous interpreters but also as consecutive interpreters. It depends on the meeting set-up which interpreting mode works best.
It can take a long time from you start working with a language combination, before you add it at AIIC and it shows up at your profile there. This is because you need vast experience in each language combination prior to adding it to your AIIC profile.
AIIC interpreters work mostly as simultaneous interpreters but also as consecutive interpreters. It depends on the meeting set-up which interpreting mode works best.
Can we book a whole interpreting team or several language teams through you?
Yes, you can. I can find, choose, and book interpreters for the entire Danish, English, or Spanish interpreting team for your event all around Europe. I can even organise all the interpreting teams you need. Most often you need simultaneous interpreters, but I also organize consecutive interpreters.
Conference interpreters call each language team a "booth", because each team works into one language (usually their mother tongue) in a soundproof interpreting booth. If —and only if— we are booked to do so, we also work retour back into one of the other languages involved (or more in very large language settings such as the EU institutions).
The pivot language on the private market in Europe is often but not always English.
Conference interpreters call each language team a "booth", because each team works into one language (usually their mother tongue) in a soundproof interpreting booth. If —and only if— we are booked to do so, we also work retour back into one of the other languages involved (or more in very large language settings such as the EU institutions).
The pivot language on the private market in Europe is often but not always English.
Can we book the technical equipment through you?
Yes indeed. I can ensure that a trusted sound equipment company provides the physical interpreting booth or mobile equipment for your event anywhere in Europe. In Denmark, my partner company is Dansk Video Center.
For all non-mobile events with a large audience, we recommend using the costlier solution, which is the interpreting booth, rather than so-called whispered interpreting on tourguide equipment in a corner of the room. We do so because the booth soundproofs the interpreting somewhat, although not entirely, improving the work conditions and the product, and avoiding mutual noise nuisance.
For all non-mobile events with a large audience, we recommend using the costlier solution, which is the interpreting booth, rather than so-called whispered interpreting on tourguide equipment in a corner of the room. We do so because the booth soundproofs the interpreting somewhat, although not entirely, improving the work conditions and the product, and avoiding mutual noise nuisance.
Can you run the teams during the meeting?
Yes, I can be the interpreters manager at your event. This "chef d'équipe" functions as the go-between liaising between all the interpreters' language teams in their separate physical booths and your own contact person in the meeting.
Can we get a discount?
Yes, you can get a discount if you book more than one interpreting team or several days of conference interpreting (simultaneous or consecutive). You can even buy a punch ticket from me to make the most of several bookings spread out over time. The punch ticket I offer allows you to combine different meetings, different languages, and different interpreting forms.
What other costs should we budget for?
Simultaneous interpreters need technical equipment, but consecutive interpreters often do not.
We all do require our non-local quality transport covered from our professional domicile, as well as any costs of our separate hotel rooms and decent meals. The latter must either be offered by the client during the event or covered with a subsistence allowance ("per diem").
We all do require our non-local quality transport covered from our professional domicile, as well as any costs of our separate hotel rooms and decent meals. The latter must either be offered by the client during the event or covered with a subsistence allowance ("per diem").
Where is your professional domicile?
My professional domicile is currently in Copenhagen, Denmark.
That means that you must reimburse me for my non-local quality transport between that city and your venue, or the equivalent if I happen to travel from somewhere else. You also must cover the last stretch at each end by taxi.
That means that you must reimburse me for my non-local quality transport between that city and your venue, or the equivalent if I happen to travel from somewhere else. You also must cover the last stretch at each end by taxi.
What is the difference between simultaneous and consecutive interpreting?
A simultaneous interpreter works in real time, relaying the meaning of the speech as the speaker speaks with a tiny time delay of only seconds. This is the most widespread form of conference interpreting and the one we recommend for big meetings.
A consecutive interpreter generally either renders a full verbal translation after the speaker is finished or when the speaker pauses. The full speech form of consecutive interpreting is used for conferences and similar type events. The intermittent form of consecutive interpreting is used for bilateral meetings and course interpreting, as well as community interpreting and other events that work well this way.
Legal interpreting at court is often a combination of the two: whispered simultaneous interpreting to the person that does not speak the language of the court, and consecutive interpreting the other way. The latter is due to the fact that in many countries court interpreters work without equipment that would allow simultaneous interpreting without disturbing the speech flow of that person.
A consecutive interpreter generally either renders a full verbal translation after the speaker is finished or when the speaker pauses. The full speech form of consecutive interpreting is used for conferences and similar type events. The intermittent form of consecutive interpreting is used for bilateral meetings and course interpreting, as well as community interpreting and other events that work well this way.
Legal interpreting at court is often a combination of the two: whispered simultaneous interpreting to the person that does not speak the language of the court, and consecutive interpreting the other way. The latter is due to the fact that in many countries court interpreters work without equipment that would allow simultaneous interpreting without disturbing the speech flow of that person.
What is a conference interpreter?
A conference interpreter works at all sorts of meetings between professionals: mostly large ones but also small ones such as liaison interpreting and business interpreting, course interpreting and market research, media briefings and media interviews.
Your event does not have to be called or considered a conference to need a conference interpreter. "Conference interpreters" means the highest-end interpreters, trained intensely at university to work in professional settings.
As opposed to community interpreters that need less training, although there is a lot at stake for the citizens they interpret for.
Conference interpreters often work as both simultaneous interpreters and consecutive interpreters, depending on your need. The most used form at professional meetings is simultaneous interpreting.
Your event does not have to be called or considered a conference to need a conference interpreter. "Conference interpreters" means the highest-end interpreters, trained intensely at university to work in professional settings.
As opposed to community interpreters that need less training, although there is a lot at stake for the citizens they interpret for.
Conference interpreters often work as both simultaneous interpreters and consecutive interpreters, depending on your need. The most used form at professional meetings is simultaneous interpreting.
