In last week’s post, I outlined some of the key components of self-directed practice. I argued that interpreter trainees need to take charge of their own development by scheduling regular, structured training sessions for themselves. Here’s the second half of the blog post — it contains the remaining features of training that all future professionals should observe to get where they’re going. Make sure you incorporate these points into your practice plan.
3. Well-designed Speech Material
All too often, students create nigh impossible speeches. Usually, this is because they read written material out loud — either texts that they have found in the news or magazines, or things they have written out themselves in full. Using either of these second-rate options is a terrible idea. When we read a written text, we don’t really communicate. Our voices are bereft of the usual markers that help others identify foreground and background material. There is little redundancy. Pauses are unnatural, as is intonation. It all adds up to a sum total that is outrageously difficult to interpret.
Avoid the problem altogether by crafting your own speeches for your classmates to interpret. Here is how.
If you are a Year One student…
Follow a simple formula for conference-style speeches. On a notepad, sketch out an outline that has the following elements: a brief introduction to the topic, a personal connection to the topic, two or three data points (initially, these should just be ideas or points that come from a newspaper article — later on, they can be actual numbers or quantities), and a conclusion that again makes a personal connection to the topic. (For another take on speech-making, have a look at this video on the SCICtrain website.)
Your speech must include the personal point of view. This is to prepare you for real life, when speakers subtly embody different people and perspectives in their own words. If you are trained to listen for these shifts now, you will hear them later on.
Also, DO NOT write your speeches out in full. Instead, jot down only the briefest of outlines. Challenge yourself to fill in the rest on the fly, as you speak. Once you have learned note-taking, you may even want to write your outline with the same symbols and strategies. That way, speech-giving becomes an exercise in interpreting, too.
Creating your own healthcare and court speech material may require more organization. This is because communication in these settings is normally in the form of a dialogue between the patient and provider, or between the lawyer and the witness/defendant. You might have to hunt down transcripts from a trial or hearing and use them as a jumping-off point for a dialogue you interpret with the help of two colleagues. As you learn about certain pathologies or treatments, you might work with two classmates to outline a patient-provider conversation that you then enact. This conversation might involve the patient describing symptoms, a doctor doing a history-taking, the doctor sending the patient for diagnostic tests, the doctor giving the patient a prescription, etc.
In both the legal and medical settings, you will also sometimes encounter monologue-like material.
For example, you might have to interpret a judge’s charge to the jury (for example, see Michigan v. Henry Sweet – Charge to the Jury page and Gregg Shorthand – Judge’s Charge to the Jury page). You might have to interpret a patient education seminar (for example, see the Patient Education Seminar video and the LASIK Seminar by Dr. Andrew Holzman – Part 1). The use conference-style techniques for interpreting this kind of material, and don’t tackle unadapted speeches of this nature until the end of Year One.
If you are a Year Two student…
Use the same techniques noted above for the conference setting, but boost the level of difficulty gradually. Make the speeches longer. Include more data points (and make sure they are hard data). Include multiple points of view (“some say that…”, “others say that…”, “we say that…”). If you are giving a speech typical of a particular institution, include elements that are authentic for that institution. For example, a speech at the UN General Assembly might use the following forms of address: “Mr. President of the Assembly, Mr. Secretary-General, Heads of State and Government, Ambassadors, Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen”.
4. Defined Objectives
Don’t do any practice without first setting a clear objective for yourself. Interpreting is very complex, and there is no way that you will make progress on all its facets at once. Instead, pick one objective before you interpret on a given day. For example, you might set one of the following goals for yourself: “I am going to sound confident when I interpret”, “I am going to focus on relaying the main links in the speech”, “I am going to convey all the numbers accurately”, etc.
It’s important that you receive feedback on your interpreting. Practice with classmates — both people who share your working languages and those who do not (there is value in getting feedback from both). All too often, new interpreting students say about their own performances, “my interpreting wasn’t any good”, and about the performances of others, “their interpreting was really good”. These are meaningless statements that help no one.
Whether providing self-evaluation or peer evaluation, you need to give concrete examples of both the strengths and weaknesses of every performance. Also, it’s important that the feedback be tailored to the specific objective that the interpreter set for the speech. For example, if the interpreter said, “I am going to convey all the numbers accurately,” then targeted and specific feedback might sound like this: “You got three of the four numbers correct, but the fourth one was off by an order of magnitude — don’t just give a number blindly, think about what it means in context (government debt will likely be measured in billions or even trillions; statistics about the population of a country will likely be given in hundreds of thousand or millions — with the exception possibly of China and India)”.
If you are a Year One student…
Limit yourself to a single objective for each speech, but vary your objectives from time to time. That way, you are targeting the entire task of interpreting more holistically, albeit spread out over time.
If you are a Year Two student…
You can start to aim for multiple objectives in a single speech. At your stage in development, you should be able to hold some features of your performance constant while focusing deliberate attention on others. Not sure if you know all the hallmarks of a good performance? As I argued in a previous blog post, the markers of interpreting quality usually fall into three broad categories — Accuracy, Quality of Delivery, and Reading between the Lines. For more info, be sure to read the older blog post.
The important thing in all of this is for you to take charge. You are responsible for your progress. Your instructors will coach you, give concrete feedback, and provide advice. But in the end, it’s up to you. Give yourself a fighting chance by organizing a structured practice plan using the principles above, as well as those from last week. Then stick to it! With the right amount of hard work, you’ll be sure to see the results you want.