Declaration on Auditory Health
The Assembly is aware of alarming reports of negative health impacts attributed to distanceinterpreting, including a variety of auditory complaints such as tinnitus and hyperacusis, andother medical complaints including dizziness, nausea, confusion, mental fog, insomnia,headaches, concentration difficulties, optic nerve sensitivity, etc. The Assembly therefore
advocates the precautionary principle in relation to DI and DI Agreements, and calls on theExecutive Committee to ensure the commissioning of urgent research to be undertaken in thisarea.
The Assembly, therefore, draws the attention of all professional freelance and staff
conference interpreters, international organisations that employ interpreters, privatemarket entities that hire interpreter services and companies that provide equipment forconference interpreting to the increasing evidence that sustained exposure to
substandard, compromised sound quality, especially in the remote simultaneousinterpretation context, may cause serious damage to the hearing of conference
interpreters, who - unlike other videoconference participants - must be able to decipher
the audio signal above the sound of their own voice in order to perform their work, andproduce other adverse health effects.
This damage may take the form of severe tinnitus (persistent ringing in the ear) andhyperacusis (acute and painful sensitivity to sound) as well as partial hearing loss, vertigo,
acute migraines, eye problems and persistent disruption to sleep patterns. In manyinstances, such hearing damage is irreversible and, in some cases, it has already led topermanent disability, prematurely ending the careers of the interpreters so affected.
These problems increasingly appear to be the result of consistent exposure to digitallyaltered, narrow-band, frequency-deficient and/or dynamically compressed defective
sound (widely known under the umbrella term toxic sound because of its noxious effecton human health), also characterised by a typically low signal-to-noise ratio, which
compels interpreters to increase the volume in their earphones to dangerous levels inorder to decipher what is being said. Digitally-altered sound may also significantly
aggravate unrelated auditory damage caused by such hazardous phenomena as acoustic
shocks, which become much more likely to occur when the middle ear has already been
made more vulnerable by consistent exposure to the compromised sound routinelyexperienced by interpreters working in the videoconferencing setting.

The Assembly calls for urgent medical studies and technical research into the precise
nature of these auditory health problems and the precise technological and anatomicalmechanisms involved in generating them. Pending the conclusive results of such research,
the Assembly also calls for the application of the precautionary principle by employers ofinterpreters in ensuring shorter periods of exposure and much longer breaks between
such exposures in order to allow for the ear to recover before being re-exposed, andit above all calls for the use, throughout the entire sound chain and especially by remote
speakers, of microphones and other technical equipment required for audio transmission
capable of reproducing the full ISO frequency response (125-15,000 Hz) and which do not
manipulate the audio signal in any way. Such technologies and equipment already exist
and are readily available.
The Assembly expresses its deep solidarity with, and strong support for, those conference
interpreters who have already incurred damage to their hearing as a consequence of toxic
sound and calls for the Association’s relevant bodies to be granted the resources required
to take every feasible step to protect the health and well-being of its members and to raise
global awareness of these hazards among interpreters, international organisations,private-market employers and interpretation equipment providers.

AIIC Assembly – January 2022