I've posted a video about conference interpreting before, but here's another cool video that was just uploaded to youtube in the last week, this time looking at the kinds of interpreting that go on in closed-door meetings. It's a little disappointing that the title, "Interpreter Breaks Down How Real-Time Translation Works," misnames the process as translation. Looks like WIRED kind of got their wires crossed a bit there (pun absolutely intended). This video looks at both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. Frankly, this vid makes them both look pretty intimidating, the simultaneous for pretty obvious reasons (listening and speaking at the same time, mental exhaustion), but the consecutive doesn't look much easier, honestly, with its indecipherable note-taking system.
Some of the terminology for simultaneous interpreting was fun to learn, though. When I originally heard the narrator say "...we can employ what we call chuchotage, which means whispering in French," for a second I thought he meant the word meant "whispering in French," rather than "whispering" in French. Wouldn't it be fun if French had a word that specifically meant whispering in their language as opposed to whispering in all other languages? But no, it just translates to "whispering". And then décalage translates to "gap." I wonder why the terminology comes from French. Did the French originally corner the market on interpretation technique? Though I mentioned my parent/teacher conference interpreting experience in the prior post on interpreting, based on this video, it looks like I did kind of a mix of consecutive and simultaneous. It wasn't as intense as full simultaneous (though we routinely went from one conference to another for 4-8 hours), but I quickly learned that things would go more smoothly if I started interpreting before each full thought was completed, sometimes while the person was still talking if they got going on a good clip. Not really whispering, though, so they usually just interpreted that (no pun intended that time) as a hint to take more frequent breaks, so then I'd end up consecutive interpreting short phrases rather than long sentences or heaven forbid, full paragraphs! But that seems like a YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) type of situation, where quasi-interrupting was taken in stride by parents and my teacher colleagues, but might not be so welcomed a practice in a meeting of diplomats...
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AuthorThis is a place where I record thoughts on second language research and pedagogical theory Archives
June 2019
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