Using generic terms to improve your retour

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

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

This episode is all about generic terms, i.e. words that describe a type, category, or class of thing.
Another way of looking at it is that this episode is all about different ways to say 'thing'!

To increase the flexibility of your retour, and your ability to describe or talk about virtually anything, you need to find general terms for specific vocabulary.

For example, you may already have a collection of useful synonyms such as these:

• goal: target, objective; ambition, aspiration, dream
• thought: idea, concept, notion, impression, consideration
• task: job, exercise, mission, undertaking, pursuit, venture, project

When you're interpreting, you choose a word based on the speaker's meaning, register, and tone.

How about coming up with some synonyms for these ideas?

• component
• event
• way
• device
• topic
• tool
• characteristic
• skill
• thing

The ability to generalise is a coping strategy in simultaneous, regardless of whether you're working into your mother tongue or a B language (retour). But like many interpreting skills, it can be useful to devote some time and effort to practising this skill deliberately (as opposed to assuming you can do it instinctively, as you may be able to do in your A language).

Another exercise you might like to try is this:
Choose a newspaper article that is deliberately quite technical or that contains unknown or very specific vocabulary. Go through the article out loud, replacing these terms with an appropriate generic equivalent.

Another option: choose a picture or short video of a device, machine, or process of some sort, preferably one that you are unfamiliar with, or where you don't have all the precise terminology at your fingertips. Can you describe how the device works in your B language?

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

Sophie (aka The Interpreting Coach)