Hi! Welcome to the Complete Interpreter podcast by the Interpreting Coach.

Why 'Complete Interpreter'? Because you're not just an interpreting or translation machine, you're also a person and a business owner, and I hope to help you take a 360 view of yourself and share some great tried-and-tested strategies to improve your interpreting skills, mindset, and marketing.

In this episode, I talk about dealing with slow speakers in simultaneous.

If you have French in your combination and you're interested in trying out the same speech I used, you can find it here. I tried the section between 02:35-08:13. Afterwards I thought it probably wasn't THAT slow! 😊

Here are some of the tricks and strategies I mentioned:

slowing down your output!
judicious use of fillers (e.g. Ladies and Gentlemen, NOT 'um', 'er', 'you know', 'like', 'I mean', etc.)
repeating/paraphrasing something that's just been said
allowing yourself to be very complete and explicit
expanding phrases, e.g. 'economic or military in nature'
using intonation/emphasis to make sure the shape of the sentence is still clear (i.e. the big picture)
using rhetorical questions

And above all:

don't be a parrot (in terms of copying the sentence structure of the original)
use salami technique
try to anticipate and use your background knowledge to make sense of the original
where possible, communicate to the speakers that they don't need to speak excessively slowly

Let me know what you'd like me to talk about next!

Sophie (aka The Interpreting Coach)

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Twitter: @terpcoach
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-interpreting-coach/

Or email me at info@theinterpretingcoach.com

Behind the Seams (and Sketches)