Dealing with slow speakers

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)