Translating and interpreting

The sixteenth entry is la cabine d’interprète, and its noun is the one an English reader will translate too quickly. Une cabine looks like « a cabin », and in two places it is one: on a ship it is where a passenger sleeps, and on an aircraft it is where the passengers sit and the cabin crew work. Everywhere else French uses the word for any small enclosed space built for a single purpose, while English changes noun every time. Une cabine téléphonique is a phone box, une cabine d’essayage a fitting room, une cabine de plage a beach hut, la cabine d’un camion the cab of a lorry, and the soundproofed room at the back of a conference hall, with its window onto the delegates, is « a booth ». No interpreter works in a cabin, and a CV or a tender that says so will be read as the work of somebody outside the trade. The same holds for the phrases built round it: entrer en cabine is to go into the booth, and travailler en cabine simply means interpreting simultaneously, whatever the room looks like.