Sara Høyrup is a Danish member of AIIC: the elite international organisation for conference interpreters. She also belongs to the local Danish court interpreters' association and Spanish Asetrad.
This Danish AIIC interpreter offers three active and four passive languages for day jobs as a simultaneous interpreter as well as a consecutive interpreter. She works from most Germanic and Latin languages.
Sara Høyrup is a seasoned interpreting organiser and interpreting teams manager liaising with the event organisers during the meeting, while also working as an interpreter on one of the teams. We call it "chef d'équipe" in industry jargon.
INTERPRETING AGENCY INTERPRETERS.DK
Since 2011, Sara Høyrup has owned and run her own conference interpreting agency. Tolkene.dk | Interpreters.dk specialises in delivering conference interpreters across Europe and beyond, even with short notice.
Through this Danish AIIC interpreter, you can book entire language teams of AIIC interpreters and other qualified conference interpreters –including sworn interpreters– for your meeting or event.
EMCI & ACI: QUALIFIED AND CERTIFIED
Sara Høyrup earned a European Master's degree in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) from Copenhagen Business School in 2010 with a retour into English.
She is also an EU-certified interpreter on the Danish interpreting team at the European institutions. In 2012, she passed the highly demanding ACI entrance test, both as a simultaneous interpreter and a consecutive interpreter from English and Spanish and later Swedish.
Sara Høyrup has worked for 14 years as an auxiliary conference interpreter (ACI) for the European institutions. For the past four years, she has worked about a hundred work days a year at the European Parliament as an on-call ACI.
SPANISH DURING DANISH PRESIDENCIES
During the recent Danish EU presidency, Sara Høyrup worked at the EU Council –from English, Spanish, Swedish, Catalan, and German, and back ("retour") into English– at both Council meetings and press briefings. She was also tasked with interpreting doorstep interview with the media.
In the same period, she provided the Spanish delegation's interpreters team for all the inter-parliamentarian meetings in Denmark. She organised the teams through her agency Interpreters.dk.
In these meetings, she functioned as a simultaneous interpreter into Spanish from Danish and English, French and Italian for the delegates from the two houses in Spain's parliament and as a consecutive interpreter at a high-level bilateral meeting between Spain and another EU member state.
During the previous Danish presidency, Sara Høyrup served as the consecutive interpreter at a bilateral meeting between the British and the Spanish ministers of justice.
OTHER RECENT WORK: ENGLISH & CATALAN
This year, Sara Høyrup provided remote consecutive interpreting (RCI) from American English into Danish for a technical training session carried out in the US. It was recorded in Danish and used for staff in all gyms belonging to a market-domineering fitness chain.
She was a simultaneous interpreter from Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian into English at an internal corporate event for Good Food Group managers in Jutland.
Sara Høyrup translated six leaflets on "internalising externalities in food production" aimed at different audiences. She tailored the language register to each target group while respecting current P.C. norms by using the unusual but official gender-neutral Danish term "landbrugere" rather than the traditional masculine form "landmænd".
She was the final proofreader on the Danish translation of an American book on power games. This job was done for a Swedish publisher.
Sara Høyrup also translated the Catalan play "Breus entrevistes amb dones excepcionals" into Danish for Pink Pavilion Festival 2026. She is the only Danish interpreter and translator from Catalan, and she has vast knowledge of Catalan culture and politics.
DOUBLE PHILOLOGIST & MULTILINGUAL TRANSLATOR
Sara Høyrup earned a BA in 2000 and an MA in 2002 in both Spanish and English language and literature from Copenhagen University. She specialised in literary translation. Prior to that, she took four years of Spanish, British, and North-American literature studies at Universitat de Barcelona with top grades.
Subsequently, she worked for a decade as a newspaper translator into Danish from German, Norwegian, Swedish, English, Spanish, and French for acclaimed Danish media outlets such as Weekendavisen and the Danish Christian Daily.
Since 1999, Sara Høyrup has also translated several novels and non-fiction books into Danish, Spanish, and English, including from Catalan and New Norwegian. She continues to provide AI-free translation of all types of text, believing firmly in the human mind's superior creative capacity anchored in a life experience that machines cannot match.
An example: a translator using generative AI translated the Catalan term "ingresos" as "incomes", although in context it clearly meant "hospitalisations", thereby changing the entire meaning of the text.
Sara Høyrup spent the pandemic running a huge translation project for Gyldendal, the Danish literary publishing giant. She found and chose, trained and ran a large team of Spanish translators and editors, proofreaders and quality controllers. Her task was to ensure the literary translation of 68 Danish and Swedish novels into Spanish in only two years for use as audio books.
SPECIALISED IN CATALAN POLITICS
Sara Høyrup studied for a multilingual Master's degree in international journalism at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona in the wake of the Catalanist secession attempt. She studied political content in Spanish and Catalan, French and English in a polarised environment.
For years, she covered the Catalan conflict intensely for Danish media. She used her profound knowledge of its background to explain the drama to a bewildered audience back in Denmark: an audience otherwise under-informed by a press that had bought into a propaganda narrative for the lack of in-depth knowledge of (and interest in) Spanish affairs.
Sara Høyrup wrote counter stories for years on end to set the record straight on a region she knows inside out. She wrote about the clash between populist regional supremacists in the rebellious camp and (not only the powers of the State but also) half the Catalan population in the anti-rebellion camp.
She interviewed pundits, locals, and expats in Spanish and Catalan, French and English. In 2017 prior to the vote on independence, she immediately came to be the foremost Danish expert on Catalan matters, informing and debating in Danish media.
Sara Høyrup organised study visits to both sides of the divide for Danish highschools and associations, interpreting presentations from Catalan, Spanish and English into Danish. She herself gave talks on the Catalan conundrum at Danish highschools and libraries, along with organising highschool exchange visits.
She translated and published a book in Danish on the divided Catalan soul. She gave it the title "De andre catalanere": The Other Catalans. She prepped Danish pundits taking a stand on the issue.
THE SPANISH CONNECTION
As the pandemic finally waned and the world opened up again, Sara Høyrup organised an EU-funded presentation tour with a Spanish migration expert. She interviewed him in front of the students and interpreted his answers at Danish universities and highschools all over Denmark.
She follows the current developments in Spain closely. This includes the backlash both in Spain and abroad, as irregular migrants are finally getting work permits that will make it more difficult to exploit them and allow them to travel back across borders to see their families.
Sara Høyrup did film studies at Universidad de Sevilla on Italian Neorealism in 1995 and before that in English at the Danish Film College. She also received Danish training in teaching adults 2015 to 2016.
TRAVELLING INTERPRETER
This Danish AIIC interpreter has lived in both Denmark and Spain, travelling between her homes in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Seville, and the EU-cities Brussels and Strasbourg and wherever work took her.
Sara Høyrup is willing and able to travel anywhere for both short and longterm interpreting assignments. Even at short notice.
Danish AIIC interpreter
Sara Høyrup works into her Danish native tongue and into English and Spanish. She works all over Europe and beyond. She has lived half her adult life in Barcelona and Seville, Spain.
Her current professional domicile is Copenhagen.
She also works from Catalan and German, Swedish and Norwegian. This Danish AIIC interpreter can organise the whole team of conference interpreters in any language combination you need, as well as the necessary technical interpreting equipment.
All over Europe and beyond.
Contact Danish AIIC interpreter
Questions
What languages do you interpret into?
I interpret in real time into Danish, English, and Spanish.
What languages do you interpret from?
I interpret in all directions between Danish, English, and Spanish.
I interpret into Danish from German.
I interpret into Danish and English from Swedish and (New) Norwegian.
I interpret into Danish and Spanish from Catalan.
I interpret into Danish from German.
I interpret into Danish and English from Swedish and (New) Norwegian.
I interpret into Danish and Spanish from Catalan.
What are your ABC-languages? (mother tongue, active and passive languages)
A: Danish (native language that I grew up with)
B: English, Spanish (active languages that I studied and also work into)
C: Catalan, German, Swedish, (New) Norwegian (passive languages that I only work from)
B: English, Spanish (active languages that I studied and also work into)
C: Catalan, German, Swedish, (New) Norwegian (passive languages that I only work from)
Where did you train to become a conference interpreter?
I earned a European Master's degree in Conference Interpreting from Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark in 2010, into Danish from Spanish and English, and retour from Danish into English.
How were you certified as a simultaneous interpreter?
I was certified by the European Union's interpreting directorates (EU Parliament and SCIC) in 2012. This put me on the list of EU ACIs: auxiliary conference interpreters at the European institutions. I was tested in Spanish and English, and later Swedish, as both a simultaneous interpreter and a consecutive interpreter.
Do you have other types of interpreting experience?
I do indeed. I worked 15 years as an on-call court, police, and asylum-case interpreter in Catalonia, Denmark, and Sweden. And I interpreted several safety and calculation courses for crane workers and riggers, when the second round of the Copenhagen Metro was built.
Since 2011, I have worked all over the private market in Europe for a wide range of companies and organisations. By private market, conference interpreters mean work outside the public institutions.
Since 2011, I have worked all over the private market in Europe for a wide range of companies and organisations. By private market, conference interpreters mean work outside the public institutions.
What does it mean to be an AIIC interpreter?
Becoming a member of AIIC is the absolute quality stamp in the conference interpreting profession. The system works with sponsors: veteran interpreters who assess your interpreting product and your professional ethics.
It can take a long time from you start working with a language combination, before you add it at AIIC and it shows up at your profile there. This is because you need vast experience in each language combination prior to adding it to your AIIC profile.
It can take a long time from you start working with a language combination, before you add it at AIIC and it shows up at your profile there. This is because you need vast experience in each language combination prior to adding it to your AIIC profile.
Can we book a whole interpreting team or several language teams through you?
Yes, you can. I can find, choose, and book interpreters for the entire Danish, English, or Spanish interpreting team for your event all around Europe. I can even organise all the interpreting teams you need.
We call each language team a "booth", because each team works into one language (usually their mother tongue) in a soundproof interpreting booth. If –and only if– we are booked to do so, we also work "retour" back into one of the other languages involved (or more in very large language settings such as the EU institutions). The pivot language on the private market in Europe is often but not always English.
We call each language team a "booth", because each team works into one language (usually their mother tongue) in a soundproof interpreting booth. If –and only if– we are booked to do so, we also work "retour" back into one of the other languages involved (or more in very large language settings such as the EU institutions). The pivot language on the private market in Europe is often but not always English.
Can we book the technical equipment through you?
Yes, you can. I can ensure that a trusted sound equipment company provides the physical interpreting booth or mobile equipment for your event anywhere in Europe.
For all non-mobile events with a large audience, we recommend using the costlier solution, which is the interpreting booth, rather than so-called whispered interpreting on tourguide equipment in a corner of the room. We do so because the booth soundproofs the interpreting somewhat, although not entirely, improving the work conditions and the product, and avoiding mutual noise nuisance.
For all non-mobile events with a large audience, we recommend using the costlier solution, which is the interpreting booth, rather than so-called whispered interpreting on tourguide equipment in a corner of the room. We do so because the booth soundproofs the interpreting somewhat, although not entirely, improving the work conditions and the product, and avoiding mutual noise nuisance.
Can you be our interpreters manager (chef d'équipe) during the meeting?
Yes, I can be the interpreters manager at your event. This "chef d'équipe" functions as the go-between liaising between all the interpreters' language teams in their separate physical booths and the contact person amongst your general event organisers.
Can we get a discount?
Yes, you can get a discount if you book more than one interpreting team or several days of conference interpreting. You can even buy a punch ticket from me to make the most of several bookings spread out over time. The punch ticket I offer allows you to combine different meetings, different languages, and different interpreting forms.
What other costs should we budget for?
Simultaneous interpreters need technical equipment, but consecutive interpreters often do not.
We all do require our non-local quality transport covered from our professional domicile, as well as any costs of our separate hotel rooms and decent meals. These must either be offered by the client during the event or covered with a subsistence allowance ("per diem").
We all do require our non-local quality transport covered from our professional domicile, as well as any costs of our separate hotel rooms and decent meals. These must either be offered by the client during the event or covered with a subsistence allowance ("per diem").
Where is your professional domicile?
My professional domicile is currently in Copenhagen, Denmark.
That means that you must reimburse me for my non-local quality transport between that city and your venue, or the equivalent if I happen to travel from somewhere else. You also must also cover the last stretch at each end by taxi.
That means that you must reimburse me for my non-local quality transport between that city and your venue, or the equivalent if I happen to travel from somewhere else. You also must also cover the last stretch at each end by taxi.
What is the difference between simultaneous and consecutive interpreting?
A simultaneous interpreter works in real time, relaying the meaning of the speech as the speaker speaks. This is the most widespread form of conference interpreting and the one we recommend for big meetings.
A consecutive interpreter generally either renders a full verbal translation after the speaker is finished or when the speaker pauses. The full speech form of consecutive interpreting is used for conferences and similar type events. The intermittent form of consecutive interpreting is used for bilateral meetings and course interpreting, as well as other events that work well this way.
A consecutive interpreter generally either renders a full verbal translation after the speaker is finished or when the speaker pauses. The full speech form of consecutive interpreting is used for conferences and similar type events. The intermittent form of consecutive interpreting is used for bilateral meetings and course interpreting, as well as other events that work well this way.
What is a conference interpreter?
A conference interpreter works at all sorts of meetings between professionals: mostly large ones but also small ones such as liaison interpreting and business interpreting, course interpreting and market research or even media interviews.
Your event does not have to be called or considered a conference to need a conference interpreter. "Conference interpreters" means the highest-end interpreters, trained at university to work in professional settings.
As opposed to community interpreters that need less training, although there is a lot at stakes for the citizens they interpret for.
Your event does not have to be called or considered a conference to need a conference interpreter. "Conference interpreters" means the highest-end interpreters, trained at university to work in professional settings.
As opposed to community interpreters that need less training, although there is a lot at stakes for the citizens they interpret for.