Language interference when interpreting

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 linguistic interference.

Here are some of the exercises I suggest:
- in simultaneous, start every sentence in a different place from the original.
- try making your EVS (décalage) longer.
- practise sight translation, giving yourself time to think about whether the output sounds natural.
- do gap filling exercises (Cloze tests).
- in simultaneous, press pause after an idea, then reformulate it, looking for concise and natural formulations, as opposed to parroting.
- work on your target language (collocations, particularly).
- when you encounter a tricky word to translate, where it's tempting to use a calque (e.g. précarité in French), look it up and consider the various contexts in which it is used. How can you make sure you're expressing the idea, rather than translating the word?
- think about how speakers frame/introduce ideas in your source language(s). Can you think of good ways to render these introductory phrases in your target language?


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

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 8:25 Reasons for linguistic interference
• 19:01 Exercises to help you avoid linguistic interference
• 27:25 Outro