Working on analytical skills

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.

This episode is dedicated to one of my hobby horses: analytical skills.

I gave several examples from a French speech on the EU's Speech Repository. It's by Michael Picq (speech number 32840).

Here are some of the exercises I suggest:
- listen to a speech and enter the information in a 4-column table (links, main info, secondary, details)
- listen to a speech then write the outline (e.g. bullet points)
- work on summarising texts/speeches
- do a 'bare bones' simultaneous, just getting the main ideas across
- pick an interview, listen to the question and the first few words of the answer. See if you can anticipate what the speaker will say next.
- gap filling exercises (Cloze)
- listen to a speech in chunks and ask yourself questions: why is the speaker saying this? What are they likely to say next? Is this fact or opinion? What biases does the speaker have? etc.
- get a speech transcript and annotate it. You can write little notes based on your background knowledge, or link parts of the speech with arrows, or circle the logical connectors, etc.

I highly recommend the Listening & Analysis resource on the ORCIT website (orcit.eu) for more 'theory' and exercises to help with analysis.

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