The time has come. After much thought and deliberation, I’m hiring interpreters as employees. We’ve had employees in the past, but they worked as schedulers and in admin. Rose has grown, and we’re serving too large a group of consumers to not provide more consistency in our services. Consumers should be able to trust Rose, and I can’t ensure that without creating policies that go beyond the scope of the current contractor relationship with the interpreters. For the interpreting community, I hope I can provide a modicum of job security with the new employee positions and share some of what I’ve learned on the administrative side of the field.
I won’t be hiring all of the 50-odd interpreters on the roster, but will assemble something like a small “Flying Squad” from my Navy days. The Flying Squad was a group of well rounded, highly trained, and dependable sailors who came running when they were called to an emergency. I won’t be pulling interpreters from one interpreting job to another, but I do look forward to putting the basic dynamic to work in the interpreting world. Rose will still have work for the contractor interpreters; the combination of employees and contractors is a hybrid that works in interpreting and other fields.
Rose Interpreting is about to celebrate its fifth birthday in June. It’s time we took on a new challenge.