Learning by Doing: Take Aways from a Simulated Event

For the mock conference, students were divided into three groups. One group interpreted the simulation. A second group played the role of audience members (in reality, they were tasked with listening to the interpreters and providing feedback). A third group was assigned a series of active roles. For example, one person had to portray CRTC Chairman Jean- Pierre Blais. Others played the roles of intervenors who had a stake in a CRTC decision. These included Canadian cable companies like Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron. It also included television content producers like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, TV Globo Internacional, UNO TV, and Al Jazeera’s beIN Sports. We conducted three rounds of the simulation so that all students had an opportunity to cycle through the three different groups.

So what did the students take away from the experience? When the dust had settled and the debriefing was underway, the students flagged a number of important points.

1. Have your fingers at the ready

The participants in our simulated hearing used five different languages. At one point, the CRTC Chairman asked a question, in French, of the beIN Sports representative, who answered in Arabic. This was followed by a brief given in Spanish by the UNO TV spokesperson. Imagine what this meant, for example, for the interpreter in the Spanish booth. She had to first take a relay from one of the neighbouring booths, where a classmate was working from French in English. Next, she had to switch her relay to another booth where a colleague was interpreting from Arabic to English. Finally, she had to listen to the floor in order to do some Spanish-to-English retour. All of this required her to have lightning-fast reflexes. As different speakers took the floor, she had to quickly select the right relay buttons on her console. If she didn’t know how to pre-set the buttons before the mock conference, she certainly did afterwards!

2. Take charge of organizing

As a teacher, I try to take a hands-off approach. I know that I can warn students over and over again about precautions they need to take, but that my words won’t necessarily sink in. But if they experience a situation first hand even just once, the resulting lesson will stay with them over the long term. For this reason, going into the mock conference, I let the students organize themselves. Actually, I let them not organize themselves. For instance, at the start of each round, I didn’t assign booths. As a result, students set themselves up higgledy-piggledy, and the arrangement changed with each round. In the seconds before the proceedings got underway, interpreters had to crane their necks around the room and see who wound up where, so that they knew who to take a relay from. A similar thing happened with audience members (who were doing quality control). They had to quickly scout out the location of their individual classmates. The lack of order was problematic. Later, during the debriefing, several students suggested that, before our next mock conference, we establish a list of set booths (French = Booth 1, Mandarin = Booth 2, etc.) just like the international organizations do. I couldn’t have said it better myself…

3. Use your documentation effectively

Before the mock conference, the students worked collectively on a short glossary. They compiled a reasonable number of vocabulary items that fit on two pages, and most everyone took this list with them into the booth. However, a lot of people had trouble using the documentation in the booth. Several people fumbled “Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission”, inventing a decidedly non-official version on the fly. Others couldn’t find “fee-for-carriage” quickly enough on their sheets and so stumbled their way past this key term. Still others hadn’t thought to include proper names on their list. They were the ones who spoke repeatedly into the microphone about “Adjust Sarah” (Al Jazeera) with great trepidation in their voices. To combat each of these issues, I suggested the students do the following.

• Write the name of your main client across the top of the glossary page, in both languages (e.g., “Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission = Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes”). When you hear this said in one language, don’t even try to translate this into the other. Instead, put your finger beside the name and simply read it off the page. This lightens the cognitive load and allows you a little more brainpower for other tasks.
• Don’t just compile a glossary. Commit it to memory. When you are mid-sentence, you will never find the vocabulary item you need on the page. So, learn the glossary contents by heart. The night before your assignment, have a friend quiz you or test yourself. Cover up the target language column and run through the source-language items. As fast as you can, try to give the corresponding target language item and move on. The next day, you can have the paper version of the glossary in front of you, but it’s really only there as a security blanket.
• Make sure there is a special section of your glossary for proper names, and commit these to memory too. Practice saying them out loud in your active language(s), and think about what they will sound like with different accents. Stop for a second as well to think about how your clients may talk about the names of organizations and public entities. The Cable Public Affairs Channel, for example, is almost never called the “see pea eh see”. Instead, most people refer to it as “see pack”. Conversely, the Public Service Alliance of Canada doesn’t like to be called “pea sack”. It prefers to be called the “pea ess eh sea”. But this doesn’t stop some people from talking about “pea sack”, so make sure you’re ready to recognize a number of permutations and combinations.

These were some of the most important lessons that came out of our first mock conference this year.