Pros
Schedule Flexibility: There are many schedule options to choose from -two to five days a week, five to nine hours a day schedules- so it's hard for you not to find one that fits your needs. You can also swap your availability with someone else sometimes for special ocassions. Pay: This is both a good and a bad reason to work at LLS: even though the salary is not bad for costarrican standards, it is ludicrously low compared to the profit that LLS makes from its outsources interpreters. I conceed that the whole point of outsourcing is to lower the productions costs, but LLS charges it's customers, per minute, about a 60% of what it pays its outsourced interpreters per hour. It's staff in Costa Rica earn just about as much as a senior engineer with no english skills and the only qualifications required for the position are english and spanish proficiency, so it is good pay; but the chasm between what you earn and what you should be earning becomes discouraging quickly. Job Stability: There are many reasons why LLS won't sink any time soon. Just like with many other outsourced services, it does well with bountyful times but it thrives during crises: the more big economies are forced to reduce productions costs, the more they outsource everything they can. Also, its maket demand is gargantuan and it keeps swelling by the thousands every passing day; simply put: as long as there is non-english speaking people in the USA, there will be a job to do. Last but not least, LLS is the the lead company in over-the-phone interpretations services, holding 98% of the American market, as of last year.
Cons
The Pay: As I stated in the section above: it's good by the local standards, but in comparisson to interpreters worldwide and to the profit ratio, it's plain insulting. The Labor Itself: Consecutive interpretation is the most difficult type of interpretation and one of the most mentally wearing activities in general. It is no surprise that consecutive interpreters get cycled every twenty minutes or so beause mental exhaustion leads to unaccuracy. At LLS, an interpreter may not always be able to afford such leisure: given a high volume of calls -e.g. every monday morning- he may have to interpret even three hours in a row. And to finish the picture, he is required to interpret for courts, 911 dispatch, insurance companies, financial institutions, hospitals... every organization out there which you may think that will need to speak with an inmigrant; that means that he has to be familiar with a mind blogging wealth of industry information which he'll manage to juggle in his head along with the regionalisms, street-talk, thick accents or mental confusion of his interlocutors. In all honesty, these words don't really do justice to the malestrom of trying to get two completely alien people to converse wtih each other: it even seemed simple to me, years ago when I had never tried to do it. Now I understand, maybe far too well to my liking, that -perhaps like the US itself- you have to be there to understand what it's like. The Facilities: They are not, by any account, an office. They are a storage hangar with walls lifted inside it in order to home cubicles and a few personal offices. Consequently, there are no windows whatsoever and all walls are white. Boxing a few hundred very stressed people in an environment which is seemingly decorated to isolate the brain from stimulus is not the best idea. Remember Guantanamo.
