What do you do when the work that once felt like a calling starts to drain you dry? I sit down with Heidi Leal to follow a courageous pivot from school counseling into professional interpreting, a shift sparked by a year of volunteering in Guatemala that reignited her sense of service and clarified a new path forward. From triage rooms and field clinics to certification exams and first contracts, this story blends heart and hard-won tactics you can use if you’re craving more autonomy in your career.

Heidi walks us through completing a 40-hour medical interpreting program, earning CHI certification, and navigating the first agency roles that built fluency and confidence. Then we get real about the industry: restrictions on working abroad, rate disparities tied to geography, and what it takes to identify partners who actually respect interpreters. That inflection point leads to a smarter strategy, niching into mental health interpreting where her counseling background becomes a true asset, and shifting focus toward direct clients for better alignment, pay, and professional control.

Along the way, we talk about marketing yourself without feeling salesy, rewriting a LinkedIn profile to speak to buyer needs, and the difference between bragging and positioning. If you’ve ever wondered whether your past experience can power a new specialty, or how to move beyond LSP dependence without burning bridges, this conversation offers a grounded blueprint. We close with practical steps: build your network, find mentors, invest in training, and treat autonomy like a skill you practice every day.

If this journey resonates, help us grow the Brand the Interpreter community, subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share this episode with someone who’s ready for their next chapter.

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A trilingual childhood, a summer camp “gig” for a few bucks, and then a single moment that changed everything: the mic flipped on, and Alain Breton realized interpreting had a name and a future. I sit down with Alain to unpack how a life steeped in French, Spanish, and English turned into a craft built on meaning, nerve, and an appetite for challenge.

The heart of our conversation is depth. Not age. Depth. Alain makes the case that great interpreters aren’t just fluent; they’re world-literate. Travel, odd jobs, and real-world stumbles add weight to your mental toolbox so you can keep sense intact when speakers sprint, pivot, or argue in real time. That’s why he loves parliamentary debates: no slides, no prep, just rapid exchanges where meaning is your only compass. We also get into flow state—how interest plus difficulty locks attention and lifts performance—and why following your curiosity matters as much as mastering terminology.

We don’t shy away from the hard rooms. Alain shares the emotional cost of interpreting top-secret briefings about child exploitation and how visualization, so helpful in clear storytelling, can also intensify trauma. He walks us through practical ways to reset: mental anchors in the moment, then intentional decompression afterward. Pro wrestling is his palate cleanser, a reminder that it’s okay to choose something playful and harmless to break the loop.

You’ll leave with three habits to level up: record yourself and review five minutes at a time, study seasoned interpreters to see how they keep coherence under stress, and build a richer life so your understanding runs deeper than any glossary. We also spotlight Found in Interpretation, Alain’s podcast co-hosted with Brian Bickford, which brings voices from parliaments to refugee camps and expands how we think about this profession.

If this conversation sparked ideas or confidence in your own path, tap follow, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps more language professionals find us and grow their craft.

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Found in Interpretation

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Ever wonder how a childhood love of RPGs could shape a world-class interpreting mindset? We sit down with conference interpreter Vladimir Kits to unpack a journey powered by curiosity, deliberate practice, and the habit of stepping inside someone else’s perspective. From snow-locked northern towns to global booths, Vladimir shows how nontraditional paths-video games, research gigs, and contest losses-can forge sharp instincts and a calm, strategic approach under pressure.

We get practical fast. Vladimir explains why strong preparation begins with strategy, not just terminology: know who the speaker is, what they want, and where they sit in the wider landscape. He shares the system that helped him climb-weekly practice groups, feedback that’s specific and actionable, and an intentionally “unreasonable” experiment: interpreting a single TED Talk 100 times to train compression, cadence, and linguistic flexibility. We explore the martial arts metaphor for interpreting, collecting techniques to counter different “attacks”-and why the craft rewards curiosity disciplined by method.

We also take a grounded look at AI. Vladimir breaks the pipeline into three stages: speech recognition, translation, and synthesis and argues that today’s strengths and weaknesses are uneven. Synthesis shines; recognition and context-aware translation still wobble, especially in noisy, overlapping, real-time settings. The takeaway isn’t fear; it’s clarity: use technology to prep better and move faster, but don’t outsource judgment. If he were starting again, he’d choose a strong interpreting school for technique and network; lacking that, he built community by posting daily on LinkedIn for a year, learning to ship work, find patterns, and separate signal from metrics.

If evolving with the work resonates, press play. Then share your best prep habit or the most useful feedback you’ve ever received. Subscribe, leave a review, and pass this along to a colleague who could use a nudge toward deliberate practice.

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