The flavors of interpreting

Basic intro for anyone who’s interested in the topic but at the beginner end of the interpreting spectrum: interpreting comes in pretty much two flavors, simultaneous (interpreter talks at the same time as the speaker, like the people in the booths at the UN), and consecutive (speaker talks, interpreter talks, speaker talks, interpreter talks).

Most people who’ve never interpreted think that simultaneous interpreting looks incredibly hard, and it is. Learning to listen and talk at the same time is a skill in and of itself. But the beauty of simultaneous is that it’s literally in your ears and out your mouth…there’s nothing to remember. Whether your sentence was perfect, or a disaster, as soon as you hear it, it’s over.

The same is not true of consecutive interpreting; you do have to remember things, especially if you do long consecutive. Consecutive itself comes in multiple flavors, of which the two most common that I’ve encountered are short consecutive, sometimes referred to as short dialogue interpreting, and long consecutive.

I had to learn short dialogue interpreting for the Colorado court interpreter exam. In court, short dialogue is used when someone, usually an attorney, is interviewing a witness. Short dialogue in court can be really short. “State your full name for the record.” “Mr. St. Pierre, how old are you?” Things like that. For the court interpreter exam, I believe that the longest utterance I had to interpret was maybe 30 seconds, which barely calls for (or allows time for) note-taking other than things like numbers and proper names. Honestly, I still struggled with it. Especially for court, you can have relatively short utterances that are pretty dense, like “When you arrived home that day, was the front door to the house locked, unlocked but closed, or ajar, and where was your car parked in terms of your vantage point toward the front door?” In court, you also have the dueling pressures of speed (no one has patience for anything in court, so you have to be fast) and comprehension (when you’re doing consec, the court reporter is taking down what you say in English, so you have to be comprehensible even though you’re trying to be fast).

Diving into long consecutive

I had honestly never done much long consecutive before I did the Glendon MCI program last year. Glendon, and I think most other programs that use the AIIC standards, has a strong emphasis on long consecutive interpreting, where you listen to an entire speech while taking notes, and then interpret the entire speech back at once. We were tested on five to seven minute speeches, and we practiced up to 10 minutes. This is a skill that, pre-Glendon, seemed about as achievable to me as performing a triple Lutz in figure skating. Like, never in a million years will I be able to do that. I remember attending an event at MIIS when I was ATA President (and a very, very beginning interpreter) and hearing someone say, “Meh, long consec, if you can do 10 minutes, you can do 20,” and I literally almost fell off my chair. Interpreting a 20-minute speech??? And now, I would actually agree with that statement: if you have the technique to do 10 minutes, you have the technique to do 20 minutes, and mostly it’s just a matter of practice, practice, practice, practice, working on both your note-taking, your memory, and your delivery so that you feel confident about your skills.

Is long consec worth it?

The main question is: is long consec worth learning? It’s hard, and painful, and the only way through it is through it. Additionally, it’s not a huge percentage of the interpreting market, at least in the US. I’ve talked to conference interpreters who tell me that they virtually never do consec, and in some institutional settings, consec has been almost completely eliminated (because no one has the patience for it) through the use of portable transmitters and receivers, sometimes referred to as bidules. People who work for entities like the US State Department or other foreign affairs entities might do long consec quite a bit, while interpreters in other settings might honestly never have a use for it.

Still, I’d argue that learning long consec is totally worthwhile, for the following reasons:

-Consec is still used in a lot of settings, and the main way to get better at short consec is to get better at long consec. I notice a huge difference in my short consec confidence since I learned long consec. I used to get a knot in my stomach when I’d interpret in court and someone would go on for more than a few sentences. Whereas now, I actually prefer that people finish their entire idea before they pause, because it’s actually easier to interpret that, versus when someone speaks in halting phrases, “On the day of the incident” (pause) “where were you going when” (pause), etc.

-It’s great to be able to do long consec if you have to. People forget to pause; they forget that the interpreter is there at all. And if you can only note down or remember one or two sentences and the person talks for two minutes, you only have two options: ask them to rewind and repeat, or botch the interpretation. Worse yet, in court you often have people talking over and at each other, so you have to ask two people to rewind and repeat. Whereas if you have good long consec technique, you can just say, “Deputy District Attorney….” “Defendant’s counsel…”

-This is admittedly a secondary concern, but long consec is just cool. It’s a joyful moment when you get to use it. Last week I was interpreting for a deposition where the deponent liked to talk. And at various points, I could see one of the attorneys sort of side-eyeing me, like “No way is she getting all of this,” only to say, “Wow, you even said it with the same expression that she used in French” (Yes! That’s what we’re trained to do!). I would not go through the pushing-a-cement-mixer-up-a-hill labor that’s involved in learning long consec just because it’s a crowd-pleaser, but if you have to learn it anyway, that’s definitely a side benefit.

Tips for learning long consec

If you’d like to learn long consecutive interpreting, I’d highly recommend Andy Gillies’ book Note-taking for Consecutive Interpreting. Andy was one of our instructors in the Glendon program and he’s amazing, and the book is really good for learning at home. David Violet teaches an online course on note-taking for consecutive interpreting, and runs consecutive interpreting practice groups. And if you want to start with the very basics (where I started), I’d highly recommend Interpretrain’s self-paced course on note-taking symbols and techniques.

Two great online speech repositories are Speechpool and the EU Speech Repository. Both have a lot of good consecutive speeches to practice with. If you’re just starting out, I would start with Speechpool, because it’s aimed at interpreting students, so there are speeches in there that are actually easy (as opposed to “easy” material for professional conference interpreters, which will be too hard for beginning interpreting students). Then you can progress on to the EU repository, with the advantage that the sky’s the limit in terms of difficulty; if you want to practice for the UN language competitive exams or similar, just go to the “Advanced/Test-type” speeches and you’ll find plenty of hard stuff to practice with.