How do translators listen to someome else speak while also repeating the words themselves in another language with some delay?

Question

How do translators listen to someome else speak while also repeating the words themselves in another language with some delay?

In: 47

Answer 1

I once had the experience of interpreting for two people at the same time while in Taiwan. There was a native speaker who also spoke some English and an American who also spoke some Mandarin. The event host had me sit between two people that needed interpretation for the event, one was an American who didn’t understand Mandarin, the other a Taiwanese man who understood little English.

The speakers tagged team back and forth, while I sat there leaning to the right or the left taking whatever the Taiwanese speaker was saying and translating to the American to my left and taking whatever the American speaker was saying and translating it to the Taiwanese to my right.

Things got a bit weird when the Taiwanese speaker started speaking English. You see, how a lot of it works due to sentence structure and other translation losses we tend to first bring the spoken words into concepts in our head, maintaining a narrative, some may say pure thought, and then simply speak out in the target language what this thought is. So what happened is I got the idea into my head, and since it was the Taiwanese speaker saying it I then leaned to the left and spoke it out again in slightly different English to the American.

This happened again later on when the American speaker started speaking Mandarin and I would bring the idea into my head and then speak it back out in different Mandarin to the Taiwanese man sitting to my right.

In all, while it took a couple tries to get the switching down, I had a blast and the two attendees got to enjoy the talks. Hopefully this illustrates part of the process for interpreting languages on the fly.