the hardest job in the world? 

the hardest job in the world?

I've just finished working on a conference where we had to do simultaneous interpretation. The subject was oil spill preparedness in the Baltic Sea and the speakers were mainly Danish, with the participants Polish. Now I say 'we' did the interpretation. In fact all I had to do was organise the interpreters, 5 of them, prepare the (very) specialist vocabulary the interpreters needed and organise training etc.
I didn't have to do any of the actual interpretation at the conference mainly because I'm nowhere near clever enough. I'm not sure it's understood, but simultaneous interpretation has got to be one of the hardest jobs in the world.
Simultaneous interpretation is not where a speaker speaks and then waits for the interpreter to sum up what they say. Simultaneous means that the speaker talks at their normal pace and the interpreter has to keep up with them.
The people who do this, I'm convinced, are a different race from the rest of us. Not only does their knowledge of the foreign language have to be perfect, they have to be fluent in their own language too, which would rule out a number of people I know. They also have to be experts on whatever the technical subject is, in this case oil spill preparation (for heaven's sake). Then, they have to be able to listen to someone and speak at the same time. Thats's not to mention the actual translation that goes on in a split second in between.
It's so hard to do they work in pairs and can manage a maximum of about half an hour at a time.
To get a tiny idea of the difficulty, listen to something on the tv in your own language then try to summarise in the same language what is being said. By the time you've thought what to say, you've missed the next sentence. It's virtually impossible to do even without having to translate from one language to another.
How do they do it?