Interpreting a speaker with a strong accent

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 and share some great tried-and-tested strategies to improve your interpreting skills, mindset, use of target language, and marketing.

In this episode, I talk about speakers with strong accents.
This is a subject I love, and so I may have become a bit carried away and shared lots of anecdotes (or....what some people may consider waffle) at the beginning of the episode. 😊

Here are some suggestions for dealing with speakers with strong accents in simultaneous:

1. don't try to 'translate' - in seeking a balance between sentence-level, 'micro' interpreting and 'macro' interpreting ('the big picture'), err towards the big picture.
2. interpret defensively, i.e. don't commit too early. Give yourself time to understand whole ideas - this may involve having a longer décalage.
3. Keep your output simple. You might want to summarise more than usual.
4. Use salami technique to give yourself more space for listening.
5. Say what you HAVE understood and/or know to be true.
6. Listen out for big ideas in the speech, e.g. is a proposal good or bad? Is the budget increasing or decreasing? Is an amount more or less than last year?
7. Pay attention to anything that conveys the speaker's OPINION, including linking words, intonation, and facial expressions or body language.
8. Make sure you use your background knowledge to fill in the gaps in what you can hear/understand.
9. If necessary, use what the audience knows to interpret in a way that is less explicit, but that the audience will still understand.
10. Even when you're not interpreting, listen to the rest of the meeting to make sure you're up to speed.

Prepare the assignment very thoroughly, and if you have the speakers' names, search for them on Youtube to see if you can find videos to practise from.

These three things will help you improve your comprehension of strong accents:

1. exposure. Get some practice! (If you're looking for interpreting practice with a variety of English accents, why not check out my collection of modules (E4T) focusing on specific topics, and designed to help interpreters improve their English C? Topics include vaccination, fake news, the circular economy, the gig economy, taxation, and supply chains. Just scroll down my home page to find the links to each module.).
2. enlarging your vocabulary.
3. making sure your working memory is in good shape.

I mentioned the following podcast episodes:

• Tips for keeping your memory in top shape
• Short decalage vs salami technique in retour
• Being concise in simultaneous

Here is Tony Rosado's blog post about heavy accents.

Let me know what you'd like me to talk about next!
 
Sophie (aka The Interpretin

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:30 A lot of anecdotes (waffle 😊) about accents
• 16:14 Should the English booth shadow?
• 17:41 What makes accented speech difficult to understand?
• 26:51 Modifying your interpreting technique to interpret a speaker with a strong accent
• 32:00 What research on accents tells us
• 43:17 How exposure/familiarisation helps
• 46:16 Summary of three useful strategies
• 47:27 Outro