Tips for maintaining your language skills

I’m working remotely from British Columbia this month, and Training for Translators classes are on summer break until September, but the weekly newsletter and blog posts will still come out during that time.

This week, let’s talk about maintaining your language skills as a freelance translator or interpreter! Many of us are tempted to say, I don’t need to work on my language skills, because I use them all the time. I would disagree with this, for a number of reasons:
-You use certain language skills all the time. For translators, this is mostly reading comprehension in your source language, for example. But other language skills are very useful, and for translators, I think that speaking well in your source language(s) can help inspire confidence in your clients, and can allow you to participate in client-side events in your source language(s).

-Even for interpreters who speak all of their languages, all the time, it’s important to keep your skills on point. Keeping my French up to date is a constant goal for me because I do not use French in my daily life, and I also recognize that I fall into interpreting ruts: if I’ve been doing mostly court interpreting, I’m interpreting the same things, all the time. So when a conference interpreting client calls with an assignment for a banking client, I’ve got some work to do.

What are the best ways to keep up, or improve your language skills?
-First, you should definitely own Eve Bodeux’s book Maintaining Your Second Language, and I say that not only because she and I are BFFs! This book has many, many suggestions for language skill maintenance and development, from lifestyle tips (change your phone interface to your non-native language) to things that are just fun (sing along with songs in your non-native language).

-My personal favorites are: shadowing, reading aloud, and using conversation teachers on italki. More on each of those below.

1. Shadowing. If you have time for one activity to improve your non-native language skills, let this be it! Shadowing means repeating after the speaker, in the same language. It’s like simultaneous interpreting, without the interpreting (it’s sometimes also referred to as “parroting,” for that reason). Shadowing helps with all kinds of things: speaking speed, intonation, pronunciation, expression. When I first started working on my interpreting skills, a huge problem was my speaking speed in French: I spoke so slowly (in an effort to speak clearly) that I couldn’t even shadow native French speakers at full speed, much less interpret. Hundreds of hours of shadowing later, things got better. You can do all kinds of things with shadowing: just repeat after the speaker to practice; slow YouTube videos down if you can’t keep up; shadow particularly expressive speakers to help with your expression; shadow really boring speakers and add your own expression; shadow and paraphrase; shadow and try to stick as closely as possible to the speaker’s speed; shadow and try to stay as far behind the speaker as possible, without losing meaning. Shadowing gets a bad rap (“boring, baby skill”) but I personally love it and I think it’s the first place to start.
2. Reading aloud is another great practice technique, because you can read something you want to read anyway (anything from the news to a novel) while practicing your speaking. I find that reading aloud helps with my speaking endurance, so that I don’t get too tired during a 20-30 minute interpreting shift.
3. Finally, I highly recommend italki if you want to work with live conversation teachers. I learned about italki from Sara Maria Hasbun‘s presentation at the 2019 ATA conference, and I used it a lot when I was improving my French skills ahead of going to interpreting school. Italki has literally thousands of teachers at all price and experience levels, and the great thing is that (as opposed to a pre-planned class), you tell them what you want to work on, and you ask them to help with your particular issues. I worked with three different teachers, and asked them specifically: pick apart my accent and pronunciation; tell me what about my French sounds least like a native French speaker and let’s work on that. Italki is really great if you just don’t have a lot of opportunities to actively use your non-native language and want someone to practice with.

I hope these tips are helpful, and maybe you’ll have some time this summer to work on your language skills!