Interpreting, despite the fact that it is often taught at universities, is not an academic discipline; it is far more akin to a craft or a sport. One cannot learn to interpret by going to a lecture (or reading a book) and understanding an explanation of how interpreting works. Interpreting is a skill or, to be more exact, a combination of skills that one can explain and understand quite quickly, but which take far longer to combine and master in practice. In practice, and through practice! This book offers some guidelines for effective practice and a compilation of practice exercises drawn from conference interpreting literature and teachers. As such, it is meant as a resource for students and trainers looking for practice ideas. Though the book is directed primarily at students and teachers of conference inter preting, the similarities between professions mean that it should also have much to offer those training for other types of interpreting – court, community, medical and sign language interpreting, etc. There are a number of simple ideas underpinning this book. First is that men tioned above, that in order to learn how to carry out a skill, we must practise, repeatedly. Second, complex skills can be broken down into their component parts, which can then be practised in isolation. Interpreting is a complex skill. It involves doing a number of different things at the same time, some of them relatively simple, some less so. In this book the skills that go to make up conference interpreting have been split up and exercises offered for each one. Each of these skills may well be new to the would-be interpreter and it is useful to learn, and practise, new skills one at a time, adding another only when the previous one has been mastered. By practising each skill in isolation you can concentrate on achieving the neces sary degree of internalisation for it without the distraction of trying to complete the other tasks at the same time.1 Let me draw an analogy with swimming. A competitive swimmer under the instruction of a qualified coach will regularly swim with a float between their legs (thus immobilising them) in order to concentrate on the arm movements alone. Similarly, they will hold the float in outstretched arms to focus on the correct leg movements. The techniques for turning around at the end of each length and breathing correctly are also practised in isolation. Only when adjustments to these elements have been made, and practised, in isolation, will those same adjustments be introduced to the full stroke. Isolating skills like this makes it possible to practise each one in a more focused way, allowing you to arrive at a stage where you have internalised the skill, that is to say, you can complete it automatically (without too much thinking about it). You can now direct the mental capacity thus freed up to one of the other tasks, until that too becomes automatic, and so on. Of course, in practice, the progression is never quite so deliberate and the isolation of skills never so exact and total, particularly for simultaneous interpreting. Nevertheless, the approach is still sound enough to be used as a complement to your other work. It is also possible to practise the complete interpreting task but also to focus on improving only one of the sub-skills while you are doing so. This is called ‘deliber ate practice*’.2 Third, it is not only through interpreting that you will get better at interpreting. You will interpret, of course. A lot! But you don’t have to, indeed, you should not, only interpret. This is particularly true in the early stages, when the full interpreting task will be far too difficult for you and the results may therefore be discouraging. But it is also true later, when you come across particular problems that are difficult to address. Fourth, a change is as good as a rest. We can practise the same skills in many different ways, or always in the same way. Using different exercises to practise the same skill can help bring a new angle to an old problem and therefore help us find solutions where perhaps we had become stuck in a rut. Last, variety is the spice of life. Having a variety of exercises at our disposal will help us avoid boredom, keep us on our toes and, as a result, keep us motivated in our quest to master the complex skill that is conference interpreting. A quest that is likely to take several years. The practice exercises included in this book have been suggested by interpreter trainers, interpreters and student interpreters; adapted from ELTA3 classes; taken from conference interpreting literature; or, to a much lesser extent, invented by the author. Where an exercise has been taken directly from a published text, I refer to the author, year of publication and page number, for example, (Kalina 2000: 179), and further information about that publication can then be found in the bibliog raphy. In the case of exercises that are widely known, or have been ‘invented’ independently by various people and appear in a published text of which I am aware, the reference appears as follows: ‘also Sainz 1993: 139’. Where the works of several authors are cited in the same place, they appear in chronological order according to the publication date. Unpublished exercises that I can attribute to indi vidual teachers are annotated with the name of the teacher in question, for example, ‘Poger’. There are no doubt also exercises that appear in conference interpreting literature that I have not read and are therefore not credited to any one author. My apologies to any author whose exercises are not properly credited to them here. Where the original mention of an exercise was overly concise, I have elaborated, sometimes considerably, on the aims and instructions for that exercise. Where es sentially the same exercise is described slightly differently by different sources, I have approximated the versions of that same exercise. And in some cases I have also suggested a number of variations on, or examples of, an exercise that the original source did not. Not all exercises in all the works cited in this book have been included here. Where exercises were not described clearly in the original, or appear to relate spe cifically to types of interpreting other than conference interpreting, they have not been included here. Also, where exercises in other works are self-contained exam ples (e.g., ‘translate the following idioms’) that cannot obviously be repeated with other material, they have also not been included here.
