Speaker 1: easy, right? Especially simultaneous interpreting. We just have to repeat what other people say, we don't have to make up our own speeches, we don't have to think of the words ourselves, we just render what other people say. Super easy, right? Not so fast. There are actually studies that show that the level of focus of simultaneous interpreters is actually equal to the one of air traffic controllers. So there's a lot more to simultaneous interpreting than you might think. What really helps a lot is that you try to forget about yourself. You forget about that you are you and that you have done so-and-so much research or you haven't. You basically step into the role of the perfect simultaneous interpreting machine. You forget you're you, you forget your pride and you just sit down and you focus and you start interpreting. So that's pretty much the most personal and important tip that our writer is giving us right at the beginning of her book actually, in the beginning of the chapter. And she's saying that another thing that really helped her, at the beginning especially, was to remind herself that she is helping people communicate. so I think it is easy to lose focus sometimes when it comes to simultaneous or consecutive interpreting because we're so focused on what we're doing and how we do it that we actually forget that the purpose is that we are supposed to help people communicate and that can help you a lot because it just reminds you of what your purpose is here. Another thing that helps is that you of course familiarize yourself with the topic that is to be interpreted especially when it's like a political situation or some topic that you don't know that much about. It really helps to beforehand do some research on the subject. When you miss a word because somebody next to the speaker coughs, not the best situation but let's say you miss the word for either below or above and you kind of know that you missed that if you know a little bit about the subject then you can make an educated guess I know that sounds really brave but if you actually know a lot about the topic and you've done your homework then an educated guess should not be too hard to do and an educated guess is always better than omitting or stuttering or not finishing the sentence. That's really what we want to avoid. You don't want to be too close to the microphone. You don't want to be too far. You kind of want to practice with that before you get started. And of course, a mistake that a lot of beginners make is that they turn up the volume for themselves too high. So because they're afraid of missing a word so they will turn the volume to the max so they can hear every breath of the speaker but then the problem is that they can't hear themselves anymore. Hearing yourself is very important because it helps you with finishing your sentences, hearing your own tone of voice and just keeping control. So it is better to practice with the volume as low as possible actually where you can pretty much barely hear the speaker and then just interpret where you can hear yourself very clearly. Interpreters who really talk loud because their volume is so loud that they are quite unpopular because you can actually hear them even when you're as a listener even when you're switched to a different channel you can still hear them in the background and of course that's probably not the best thing. When you first get into the booth you have to make sure you know the buttons. Sometimes a green light can mean that you're free to interpret and a red light means that the microphone is off and you can talk to your booth mate. With some situations, some conferences the opposite is the case. So when the red light is on you're on air and when the relight is on you can talk to your booth mate. So you want to make sure that you know beforehand what is going to be the case and of course make yourself familiar with the cough button and everything else that might be important for you. And what also helps is looking at a list of all the participants and checking out their names, some names that you might find difficult to pronounce you should probably practice before you get in the booth and also like I said political situations you want to know if maybe a country has been renamed you don't want to name that country by its old name or mispronounce a new name so really making yourself familiar with the material is really I think the most important point when it comes to conference interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. Also you should try to keep the same level of animation as the speaker. If the speaker speaks in a very bored and slow tone you kind of want to imitate that. However not too much because you don't want to send all the listeners to sleep. So it is okay to add a little more motivation to the speaker but not too much. Don't make him a completely different person. And of Of course, also the opposite, if the speaker is very enthusiastic, you need to be enthusiastic as well. And that's the whole point of actually seeing the speaker while in the booth. Reformulation is another thing. If you're stuck on something, try to reformulate. What can be a problem sometimes is that the speaker will refer to a certain title of a book or a movie, and in your target language it might have a different title. So that can be tricky and again this is also what the author mentioned several times is that you need to keep and have a broad knowledge of what is going on currently and that for example is one of the reasons why interpreting schools only accept postgraduate students because they need to have a certain level of education. Of course accuracy comes before style. So if something doesn't sound completely perfect It's not perfect obviously, but it's better than not being accurate. So don't sacrifice the accuracy for the style and There's also a process called macro processing which means that if you have a lot of dense information information that you can kind of shorten it, not shorten too much, but sometimes there's no other way. The information is too dense, the speaker speaks too fast, you kind of have to filter the most important points out and that's perfectly fine, it's a professional thing to do. Sometimes there's no other way, even if you had the text beforehand. And make yourself familiar with certain accents like Indian accent, Japanese accent, German accent. Make yourself familiar with that because you don't want to get caught by surprise with something like that because when you have somebody with a thick accent and you can't understand him, you're not really considered professional anymore. You're supposed to be able to cope with different accents. Another important point is your target language, usually your mother tongue. You need to keep it intact, which means that you can't have it contaminated by the language of the country you're living in right now, for example. I know it sounds strange because people take their mother tongue for granted when you can really forget it. If you live in a different country for a longer period of time, you will forget certain things. This is a very hard thing to accept for people who live in a country where their mother tongue isn't spoken, but it is the hard reality. What we can do to prevent that from happening, to prevent our mother tongue to have a lot of, for example, English expressions in it. What we can do is we can occupy ourselves with the literature, newspapers, TV shows, music, whatever works, to just stay focused on the purity of our native language. Because, like I said, it is not a given to be fluent in a language, even if it is your mother tongue. You can actually forget your mother tongue. So just make sure that you make a conscious effort of working on your mother tongue as well. Even if you do live in the country where your mother tongue is spoken, even then you can always improve your own language. People think their mother language, they know it perfectly, but really nobody knows any language perfectly. There's always room to improve. So this is also my personal recommendation. Just keep up to date with the things happening in your country. It might sound tedious. We would all just like to walk into a conference without any preparation and just be able to do a perfect job interpreting, but that is not reality. You should at least two weeks before the conference study the documents that the organizer has hopefully provided you with, because you need to be able to speak like a brain surgeon, like a expert technician, like a meteorologist, just like it was your own subject. And you can't do that if you don't have the terminology for that. You need to be able to render exactly what the person says and also keep it at the same register. So one thing is open your documents early. You get an email from an employer. Don't postpone it. Don't procrastinate. Just open that email and see what's in there because usually the information is quite dense. It has information about the location and if you ask about something even though it's already in the email, then that never leaves a good impression. Do you know what I mean? It's just not very professional and Yes, open your documents early, try to get familiar with all the documents as fast as possible. If you don't get that documentation, then there's not really anything you can do. Just try to make the few minutes before the conference as productive as possible. Don't just read the documents that they provide to you, but also do your own research, go online, go the extra mile because it's better to be safe than sorry as we probably all know and Also dictionaries is a good point people think dictionaries should be lifesavers for interpreters, right? No dictionaries are very distracting it takes a long time to find an entry and And you can't walk into a booth with a ton of dictionaries in your hand and constantly be flipping the pages while you are not interpreting and possibly distracting your boothmate who is interpreting at the time. So you should definitely limit the use of dictionaries and instead you should keep glossaries. You should faithfully keep glossaries. it will just give you that feeling of security when you might feel like you need some extra security. And of course you should take notes when it's not your turn to interpret, just in case the words come up again. Sometimes your employer does brief you and if he does it is okay to ask questions, intelligent questions, right? And of course about the glossaries again, just make sure to personalize them, you can have them on your laptop, you can have them on paper and you can even ask your colleagues if you can get a copy of their glossaries. Sometimes, most of the time, they will actually do that, provide you with copies and of course keep your glossaries well organized. No glossary is worth anything if you can't find it. Keep it well organized because over the years you will get a lot of terminology that you noted down. You can take your laptop into the booth like I said just be sure not to type too loud that's rude you know just try to keep it quiet you can bring a pair of binoculars in case you have 5,000 listeners 6,000 listeners you can bring a pair so you can actually see the speaker and interpret as well as possible. Stay modest you don't want circumstances to weirdly get to the point where you have to interpret from a shaky language of yours. Be modest because if you do mess it up there's a good chance you're not going to get hired again. You have to protect your reputation when it comes to that so better be safe than sorry. You can always add another language later on when you're really positive that you are confident in interpreting from and into that language. Miss Corinne, for example, she does not study her documentation, she does not... she thinks it's boring, she thinks it's off-putting, she thinks it's tedious and she'll just go with the flow, you know, it'll work out, is what she tells herself. But then when she's at the conference, she can't keep up, she doesn't finish the sentences, her voice is panic-stricken and high-pitched, not pleasant to listen to, she jumps from sentence to sentence, she doesn't speak clearly and yes she just can't keep up and she's never going to get hired again. And that does not only harm her but it actually harms all of the interpreters in that conference because people are not going to say Corinne did a bad job interpreting, they're going to say the interpreting here was bad so it really shines a bad light on all of the interpreters that were taking part in that conference. Now on the opposite side you have the good interpreter so let's name her Bertha like in the book. She spends many long days studying the material, she goes through terminology the ideas, she notes it down, she insists on getting documentation. She really wants to be prepared. Some people might say she is too into the matter or that she is too complicated but when they need someone who they can rely upon for accuracy then they would definitely hire her. And of course she also has her glossaries or personalized glossaries. One thing that I could not really understand was the author said that she basically had a joke that worked for all situations so she would crack that same joke every time the speaker made a joke that's what I understood from the reading so but but what if the joke doesn't make sense at all in context to what the speaker has been talking about so I would like to know your opinions on that. What do you think about having jokes in the back of your mind that you can tell in emergencies or would you rather prefer to say the speaker just cracked a joke please laugh. So yes I think that's that's a that's probably one of the most difficult things when it comes to conference interpreting is that you you never know what's coming there might be a joke, a film title, a proverb, you just never know and you have to be prepared for that, which you can't always be. So sometimes it's really best to admit to it and just be like the speaker just made a joke please laugh because it's it's better to do that than the speaker lose face and nobody's laughing especially in certain cultures that that that really can end up in a fiasco. don't work more than seven hours your interpretation will be substandard don't ever do that if a conference is taking longer than that remind yourself this is your reputation that's on the line you might be tempted you might get offered more money but remember your reputation is priceless if you interpret for 10 12 hours and at the end you don't even care about what you're saying anymore you're not gonna get hired again. People are going to talk. The organizers are talking to each other. Copyright is another issue. Make sure you clarify that you do not want to be recorded without your permission. You do not want your interpretation to be sold without your permission and without you getting anything of the profit. You can socialize during lunch times of conferences, cocktail parties, it's always good to introduce yourself. You can even walk up to the speakers and ask them how or what they thought about your interpretation and who knows who you're going to meet, right? Thank you so much for listening guys and just let me know if you have any questions. Have a good week. You