Conference Interpreting Techniques

Conference Interpreting Basics

• Conference interpreters should provide accurate reproductions of original speeches.
• Modifications are acceptable only if they clarify the speaker's meaning for the audience.
• Personal opinions should never be introduced by the interpreter.

Empathy and Perspective

• Interpreters should embody the speaker's perspective.
• This includes understanding and conveying their emotions and viewpoints.
• This requires stepping into the speaker's shoes to deliver a convincing interpretation.

Modes of Interpretation

• There are two primary modes: consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.

Consecutive Interpretation

• Involves listening to a speech or passage, taking notes, then recreating it.
• Efficiency is crucial in consecutive interpreting.
• An interpreter should aim for approximately three-quarters of the original speech's duration.
• Relying on memory alone to reproduce speeches is possible, especially for shorter segments.

Simultaneous Interpretation

• Requires listening and interpreting at the same time.
• Typically done with equipment in soundproof booths, delegates use microphones, and interpreters use headphones.
• Whispered simultaneous interpretation, or 'chuchotage,' is used when equipment is unavailable to a small audience.
• Simultaneous offers time efficiency over consecutive interpreting and facilitates multilingual settings.

Skills for Both Modes

• Conference interpreters must be proficient in both consecutive and simultaneous modes.
• This involves active listening, understanding, analysis, and re-synthesis.
• The interpreter must accurately represent the speaker's message, finding a balance between literal translation and potentially inaccurate interpretation.
• They work in 'real-time' environments, they must be quick and efficient under pressure.
• This highlights the necessity for interpreters to analyze and re-synthesize ideas rapidly under stress.

The Conference Interpreter's Work Environment

• Conference interpreters encounter varied subjects, shifting between international organizations and the private sector.
• They may work for private companies, trade unions, ministries, and more.
• Interpreters in international organizations often work simultaneously.
• A lack of personal interaction with delegates and anonymity are common.
• Regular work in the same organization can lead to familiarity with procedures, topics, and committee work.

The Private Market

• Private market work is less predictable, with a client-service relationship that tends to occur irregularly.
• It requires interpreters to manage a diverse client base to maintain a steady income.
• Private market interpreters must handle highly technical, scientific, and medical conferences.

Meeting Types

• Bilingual meetings often use interpreters capable of translating in both directions between two languages.
• Multilingual meetings typically have interpreters translating into their native languages.

Essential Skills and Training

• The skills required for each type of meeting differ, this could lead to interpreters specializing in one.
• Some interpreters can handle interpreting into two languages as well as pull from a high number of languages.
• Meetings can range from general to highly technical.
• Preparatory reading and technical glossaries may be necessary for technical meetings.
• Interpreters must be adaptable due to the wide range of working conditions and subject matter.
• Broad general knowledge and perpetual intellectual curiosity are crucial for an interpreter.

Key Definitions for Interpreters

• Interpreter: For the purposes of this, this refers to a conference interpreter.
• Consecutive/Simultaneous: Refers to consecutive or simultaneous interpretation as nouns.
• Speaker: This implies the original speaker being interpreted.
• Source Language: The original language of a speech.
• Target Language: The language the interpreter translates into.
• Passive Language: A language an interpreter can interpret from.
• Active Language: A language an interpreter can interpret into.
• Working Languages: The sum of an interpreter's active and passive languages.
• Mother Tongue: The interpreter's best active language.
• Retour: Interpreting into an active language that is not the interpreter's mother tongue.
• Relay: Used in multilingual meetings, where one interpreter translates into a language understood by another, who then interprets into the final language.

Basic Principles of Consecutive Interpreting

• To interpret effectively, ideas must be clear.
• Interpreters must analyze and understand individual ideas to build a line of reasoning.
• The three steps for a consecutive interpreter are: understanding, analyzing, and re-expressing.

Understanding

• Understanding encompasses ideas, not just words.
• Lack of vocabulary should not prevent understanding.
• Interpreters should grasp the overall meaning, even without knowing every word.

How to Handle Unfamiliar Words

• Admit ignorance and ask for clarification depending on the situation
• Understanding ideas is more crucial than knowing every word.
• It's unacceptable to 'betray' delegates by omitting or guessing meanings to mask ignorance.
• A strong grasp of passive languages is essential for deducing meaning from context.
• Constant attentive listening is also crucial to re-express ideas efficiently in another language

Active Listening Skills

• Active, attentive listening differs from passive listening.
• Interpreters must carefully consider every element of a speaker's message, unlike casual listeners.
• The goal is to understand the speaker's intentions and underlying ideas.
• Constant self-questioning is necessary to decipher the speaker's intended meaning.
• Active listening is a learned skill that requires focus, stamina, and mental alertness.

Analyzing Speech Types

• Analysis of speech is a process that is born out of active listening.
• It is important to determine which type of speech is being given.
• This can influence how an interpreter listens and interprets.
• Reasoned, logical arguments can present both sides or lead to a single conclusion.
• Speeches may be narrative (chronological), descriptive (statistical), polemical (convincing), or rhetorical (impressive).
• 'Stone-walling' speeches conceal information, requiring the interpreter to remain non-committal.

Interpreting Different Arguments

• Interpreters must follow logical connections and turning points in reasoned arguments.
• Signposts like "but," "however," and "on the other hand" are crucial.
• Speakers may navigate between viewpoints or present arguments sequentially.
• The interpreter has to make the argument's structure lucid for the audience.

Pro and Con Speeches

• In 'pro and con' speeches, identify and correctly convey the central theme of the speech.
• It is noted an interpreter should signal any changes in direction to allow the audience an opportunity to understand.

Identifying Turning Points

• Phrases like "clearly," "obviously," and "it is true that" can introduce contrasting arguments.
• It is important to make direction changes clear to the audience through pauses.
• As a result, consecutive interpretation can be superior to the original speech in clarity.

How to Handle One-Sided Arguments

• One-sided arguments depend on logical links, such as "as," "given that," "therefore," and "consequently."
• The explicit structure of those arguments also leave them vulnerable to the point a single error from the interpreter could cause the entire argument to collapse.

Structuring Speech

• Speakers offering explicit structure or numbering ideas aid the interpreter.
• If the speaker is unfaithful to the outline, the interpreter should still create the interpretation around the actual reasons given.

Third Type of Speech

• Narrative, chronological speeches require attention to time phrases, dates, and verb tenses.
• If a speaker disregards the timeline, the interpreter must decide to correct the speaker as subtly and seamlessly as possible.

Description of Speech

• Descriptive speeches are a juxtaposition of items and are difficult.
• The interpreter should concentrate, decide what is the most important information, and remember and note as much of that as possible.

Polemical Speech

• Speeches can also be polemical.
• To be polemical does not necessarily mean illogical, discourteous or dishonest, but it may involve any one of these three things, or a combination of them
• The interpreter must have the intellectual flexibility to reproduce something they find highly questionable, and they must do so to the best of their ability, trying to be as convincing as possible.
• With this being said, it is the role of an interpreter to help people come together and understand one another, and there are times when an interpreter may tone down comments in order to take the sting out of a meeting.

Rhetorical Speech

• Rhetorical speeches may often involve references involving proper names and titles.
• It is catastrophic if such references are not picked up and included in the interpretation.
• Some ‘rhetorical’ speeches may be pure stonewalling. For such speeches, the interpreter should follow the speaker as closely as possible.
• It is also a golden rule of interpreting, in all circumstances for the interpreter to make no substantive addition to a speech.

Exhaustiveness

• Speech types are far from exhaustive.
• Most speeches are hybrid and share characteristics from two or more speech types.
• It is useful for the interpreter to identify, be it only instinctively, such speech types.

Identifying Main Ideas

• Determine important, secondary, essential information in what's said.
• The speaker's ideas should be reproduced along with their spirit and significance.
• A poor consecutive will be missing relative importance in the given interpretation.
• It is important to identify the main ideas as the interpreter may be under duress/ pressure because of the intrinsic difficulty of the speech or the speed of the speaker, and will therefore have to omit one or more elements of the original.
• Furthermore, it is also very useful for all interpreters to be capable of providing a summary of a speech.

Secondary Ideas

• 'Main ideas' implies a hierarchy of relative importance of ideas.
• One or more ideas may be central to a proposition.
• Delegates generally need answers to the questions: who? what? when?

Word-Level Grammer

• For a word-level grammar, the subject of the sentence is a noun, the spokesman, with Socialist functioning as an epithet relating to it.
• For the interpreter, elements in a speech that fall outside both the subject-verb-object analysis and an analysis of points of view are at best secondary.
• However, as always, the interpreter must work from context.
• The interpreter must also be wary of 'false epithets', that is, adjectives presented as epithets but which have predicative value.
• By definition, examples are secondary to the main thread of an argument.