How do translators listen to someome else speak while also repeating the words themselves in another language with some delay?
In: 47
Sorry for the wall of text.
TLDR: It’s practice.
One of the best exercises is to listen to radio in your language and simply repeat every sentence in real time – give the radio something like a 5-10 words head start to begin with. This would be for ‘simultaneous interpreting’ which is the ‘live interpreting’ you usually see during conferences. You can wait for 2-3-4-x sentences, pause the audio and then repeat the words – that’s ‘consecutive interpreting’. You have to do it out loud – doing it in your head helps a bit, but it’s not the same.
(Radio or voice only is easier than watching TV; it’s less information to process – that’s why sometimes you’ll see interpreters close their eyes or look at a fixed point in space when working.).
Once you can do that easily, you move on to rephrasing instead of repeating. The goal isnt to just rephrase – the words you use don’t really matter, just the idea. Once you get the hang of that, you move onto preserving the register – if they use ‘dude’ you use something like that, you do not replace it with ‘sir’.
Once you got that, you introduce the other language.
Most of us use traditional memory tricks inadvertently – for example I create a very simple movie in my mind turning a sentence like “he picked up a red flower” into a few frames and just describe that scene in the different language. If I’m interpreting something regarding body movements, I will imitate them eg: ‘punched with the right hand’ makes me clench my right fist and tense my right arm which helps me remember these extra details which are incredibly important in a legal setting – think of a police interview.
We also use notes – we don’t actually use full words and my notes would not be understandable by any other interpreter. I can’t even understand them the next day. They’re symbols, signs, shorthand, etc. The only recognisable writing would be numbers and proper nouns. My notes were “subpoenaed” once and it was the funniest thing trying to explain to some fancy detectives that I have no idea what’s in them.
After enough practice you can listen to people talk in different languages at the same time and be able to separate and interpret each stream after.
Although I can interpret accurately at pretty much any speech speed, if you ask me about it the next day or even an hour later, I will not be able to give you any details. I call that ‘inbuilt confidentiality’.
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