Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

MCI: Done and dusted!

As I wrote about here, and here, my lemonade-out-of-lemons project during the pandemic was doing the Glendon College/York University Master of Conference Interpreting (MCI) program, which moved online this year. It was a huge challenge and a great opportunity (more on that below), and last week I got the exciting news that I passed the exit exams and am officially an MCI. I’m really glad I jumped on this chance, and it’s a relief to have finished the program and passed the exit exams…now I just have to decide what to do with the degree!

How second semester went

In the two posts I linked to above, I wrote about my first month, and then my first semester as an MCI student. At that time we had some hope that Canada would open up to international students and we’d be able to be on campus at Glendon for the January-April term, but COVID had other plans, so we remained online. Second semester included the same classes we took during first semester, interspersed with some really great intensive courses with Helen Campbell, Michelle Hof, and Andy Gillies, which added a lot to our experience. As in the first semester, we also had the opportunity to interpret for many live events at Glendon, including a lot of conferences and seminars for Black History Month. Otherwise, things were much the same as during the first half of the year: I kept working part time doing translation, teaching online courses, and doing a little court interpreting, but the workload was manageable because there still was not much else to do during COVID.

The exit exam process

Classes ended in mid-April, and then we had about six weeks to focus on preparing for our exit exams. These are high-stakes, because at Glendon, as in most AIIC-endorsed conference interpreting programs, you don’t get the degree until/unless you pass the exit exams, no matter how you’ve done in the classes. I did the degree in English (A) and French (B), so I had four exit exams: a six-minute consecutive and a 12-minute simultaneous in both directions. Although Glendon offers retake opportunities, my goal was to pass all four exams on the first try so that I could just get the degree and move on with actually finding conference interpreting work.

I do best with a lot of structure, so I developed a really simple practice routine and just set a goal of going through that routine every single day, knowing that if I aimed for seven days a week, I’d actually probably do six days. I got this tip from Athena Matilsky when I worked with her to prepare for the Colorado Court interpreter exam. My routine was:

  • Listen to French news (usually France 24 or France Culture) for around 15 minutes
  • Practice numbers on the website numerizer for around 15 minutes
  • Interpret one consecutive speech, alternating days between English and French
  • Interpret one simultaneous speech, alternating days between English and French

This took around an hour, and I found that removing the analysis paralysis of deciding what to practice was really helpful. Instead of focusing on the best or optimal practice for that day, I just did the same sequence of exercises over and over again. I also practiced with other students from my program so that we could give each other feedback, which was also very helpful.

Exit exam week

We took our exams from home, using a platform called GoReact. I liked GoReact a lot because it plays the source video and records you at the same time, so that you don’t have to worry about running multiple platforms. We were able to practice with GoReact a bunch of times so that we wouldn’t be stressed about how to operate it on exam day, which helped a lot. I decided to control absolutely everything I could control during exam week, because I wanted to feel that if I didn’t pass, it was purely because my skills weren’t up to the standard that the evaluation jury expected, not because I was underprepared or because I didn’t have my exam-taking environment set up properly. My husband had the opportunity to go out of town and I encouraged him to do that so that I would have the house to myself and be able to be on my own schedule, and the night before my first exam, I went to a two-hour yoga class with live harp music and went straight to bed when I got home. A few other tips that our instructors and fellow students gave me that really helped:

  • Make a checklist, so that you don’t sit down on exam day and realize that you don’t have a pen, or that your notebook is out of pages, or whatever. Include seemingly obvious things like getting a drink of water and going to the bathroom 10 minutes before the start time. This sounds really basic, but I wanted to set everything up with as little left to chance as possible and I knew I would be nervous on the day of the exam. Tip from fellow student Amélie Roy.
  • Rather than focusing on giving a Carnegie Hall performance on exam day (which you probably won’t do because you’ll be nervous), focus on using the prep period to improve your overall skill level, so that if you do, let’s say 75% of your best on exam day, it’s still good enough to pass.
  • Whatever happens on exam day, don’t stop once you’ve started a speech. If you have an internet glitch, or think it’s the wrong speech, or miss an entire sentence, or whatever, just keep going, because there’s still a chance you will pass, and if you stop in the middle of the speech, you will definitely fail.

My first set of exams was English into French (which was good for me, because it’s my harder direction and I got it over with first), then we had a rest day, then French into English. In the end I thought that the exam speeches were about what I expected: neither significantly easier nor significantly harder than I thought they would be. I felt very drained afterward, from the tension and anticipation, but I also felt that I had done a solid performance, and if I failed, there really was nothing to do except study more and try again.

But I passed! I was prepared to retake any exams that I had failed, but it’s also a relief to have successfully completed the program and be able to move on to looking for work. If anyone has questions about the Glendon program or about doing an MCI when you’re not 22 years old (I’m 49), just let me know in the comments. And if you too are harboring a big, crazy dream, go for it! It’s not too late, but someday it will be, and the time is going to pass anyway, so get going!


Corinne McKay

Tips for keeping up your language skills

For the past several years, since I decided to start pursuing interpreting in addition to translation, I’ve spent quite a bit of time keeping up my French language skills. This year, in my Master’s in conference interpreting program (which you can read about here, and here), I spent a lot, lot, lot of time working on my French language skills. I think active language skills are really important, even if you’re exclusively a translator; active language skills let you communicate with clients in their language, which can open the door to higher-paying work, for example.

“Language skills” can mean many things in our profession: definitely your non-native language, but you might also be learning a new language, or your native language might have become your non-dominant language over time. For example if you’re a native Russian speaker but you’ve lived in the US for 30 years, English might have become your dominant professional language and you might actually need to work on your Russian. Having been “in the trenches” of language maintenance, here are my top tips for anyone else looking to do this!

Buy Eve Bodeux’s book, and not just because she’s my friend!

Step one, if you’re at all interested in language maintenance, you really need Eve Bodeux’s book Maintaining Your Second Language, and not only because Eve and I are BFFs! Eve’s book is a) packed with tons of strategies so that you’re sure to find something that fits with your goals and abilities, and b) the most comprehensive resource I’ve found on this topic. I highly recommend it for anyone on the language maintenance journey.

How I started

The most basic speaking skill you practice as an interpreter is shadowing, meaning that you just repeat after the speaker in the same language. When I decided in 2017 that I wanted to prepare for the state-level court interpreter exam, I was dismayed to learn that I couldn’t even speak fast enough in French to shadow normal-speed speakers. I would constantly get distracted by trying to listen and talk at the same time, and I couldn’t physically talk fast enough to keep up. That’s how I discovered my first language maintenance hack: slowing down YouTube videos. Most speakers sound pretty normal (not distorted) at .75 speed, so that’s how I started. Even better, you can pick people who are naturally slow talkers (I recommend former French president François Hollande) and slow them down, and then you’ve really got something manageable! And yes, you can also speed up YouTube videos, which I later did to prepare for my conference interpreting final exams.

Another good resource for slow shadowing is the News in Slow… language learning shows, which are available for various languages, and are actually slow. I say “actually slow,” because some “easy” resources are really not that easy. For example Radio France Internationale’s Le Journal en Français Facile (“the news in easy French”) is actually not that easy; I’ve never timed how many words per minute they speak, but mostly, the “easy” element is that they’ll pause and explain certain concepts, like what a difficult word means.

Another go-to: reading aloud

Another one of my favorite tips from Eve’s book is reading aloud (to yourself or to someone else). One thing I’ve really noticed this year is that speaking another language is very physical; you have to actually build up the muscles for the sounds that don’t exist in the language you speak all the time. Over the course of this year, as I spoke more French than at any time since I lived in France in the early 90s, I noticed that my pronunciation of the French “r” (a perpetual problem for me) consistently got better, not because I can’t hear when it sounds bad, but because I physically developed the muscles to pronounce it better.

Reading aloud is a great way to build up this skill, and because it’s probably not something that you’re going to do for hours at a time, it’s a good “filler” activity; read a news article aloud when you’re waiting on a conference call, or waiting for the oven to pre-heat, or waiting for someone to call you back, or any of the little slices of five minutes that you have during the day.

Flood your brain with the other language

As I battled to improve my spoken French this year, another of Eve’s tips that really helped me was just to flood my brain with French, without worrying about the subject matter being academic or informative. Because keeping up with current events is a key skill in conference interpreting, I did listen to plenty of academic and informative stuff; particularly the France 24 news network, and the France Culture family of podcasts. They have tons of shows, and I particularly forced myself to listen to some of their multi-guest talk shows where people interrupt each other, talk over each other, etc. and you really have to stay focused to follow the discussion. But in addition to that, I switched all of my “mindless entertainment” time to French stuff; I got totally addicted to the French “house hunters” shows Chasseurs d’appart and Maison à vendre. These have the advantage of using more colloquial speech than one hears in a typical political show, which can be really helpful when you don’t have contact with your other language in your daily life. I tried to listen to French when I was exercising, cleaning, driving, folding the laundry, waiting for my husband to finish skiing, really any time that my brain was available while my body did something else.

Time takes time

My other top tip for language maintenance is a mindset one: it takes time, and once you get to a certain level, your improvements are going to be incremental, not meteoric. You know how, when you start learning a language, all of a sudden one day, something comes out of your mouth that you didn’t even know you knew how to say? I feel like that with Italian. My Italian is atrocious, but because of that, there’s tons of room for improvement. The first time I walked into a hotel in Italy and said, “Abbiamo una prenotazione per una camera tripla” (We have a reservation for a triple room), and the desk clerk responded as if we were having a totally normal conversation in Italian (instead of getting the “Oh geez…and of course the only person who speaks English has left for the night…” look on his face), I honestly almost cried from happiness. But yeah…that kind of breakthrough doesn’t happen anymore when you’re trying to make incremental improvements to your already pretty good language skills. Most importantly, time takes time. Give it time, and keep plugging away at it.

Additionally, tell any native speakers of your other language to be ruthless when they give you feedback. One thing I found particularly helpful was to ask the French A (native French speaker) students in my conference interpreting program to point out things that I say all the time that don’t sound native in French. One example: I realized that when I speak English, I use the expressions “things like that,” and “that kind of thing” a lot. That might be its own issue, but the bigger issue is that in French, I used to use the direct translation, “des choses comme ça” a lot. Until…one of my French A buddies very helpfully said, “I understand what you mean, but as a native French speaker, I would never say that; instead say ce genre de choses.” There really is nothing like a conference interpreting program to make you hyper-aware of all of your speaking mannerisms, but I thought this kind of feedback was really helpful. And I think all of us can think of people we know whose non-native language skills are really good, but there are certain expressions they use all the time that just don’t sound native. Make use of your native-speaker friends to give you that kind of feedback.

I hope these tips are helpful and I’d love to hear yours in the comments!


Corinne McKay

How to take a vacation

As opposed to last summer, many of us may be thinking about taking an actual vacation this summer, meaning that we have to think about how to manage that while still managing our businesses. I love working, but I also love vacation, so I’ve honed a strategy that works for me. The key points are:

  • First, make it possible to actually take vacation, from the financial standpoint. I do this by maintaining a business savings account, into which I deposit 40% of every payment from every client. This money goes (mostly) to taxes and other non-negotiable business expenses, but also to “paid vacation,” because I draw money out of that account to pay myself when I take time off.
  • Decide whether you’re going to work while on vacation, and if so, how much. I make a point of taking at least one week in the summer and one week in the winter where I don’t have my laptop along. This physically prevents me from working; I can honestly tell clients, “I don’t have my work stuff with me,” and I feel that it’s important for my physical and mental health and for my family relationships. Over the years, I’ve taken up to a month off without a computer (and lived to tell!). And I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world to work for a few hours a day while on vacation; especially if you live in a culture such as the U.S. where most people simply do not take vacation, spending a couple of hours a day on e-mail and other “maintenance” tasks is certainly better than not taking any vacation.
  • Be realistic about your clients’ expectations. Things like e-mail response time are very culturally-specific. In the U.S., it’s common for people to put on their auto-responder if they’re going to be unreachable for even half a day (I received two of these auto-responses yesterday!). In some cultures, it’s totally acceptable to respond to an e-mail a week later, and say, “Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, I was on vacation last week.” Just make sure you’re meeting the expectations of the clients you want to work with.
  • Tell clients what to do in your absence. If you work mostly with agencies, this shouldn’t be hard: tell your clients your vacation dates as soon as you know them, remind your clients right before you leave, and then let them know that you’re back. Not too hard. With direct clients, it’s more complicated, because you may be the only translator they have for your language pair. Probably the easiest way to handle vacations if you work for direct clients is to schedule your vacations for your clients’ slow times (December and August?) or to take short-enough vacations (one week or less?) that your clients don’t really need a replacement translator. However if you’re going to take off a longer amount of time, or if your clients may really need you, you need a trusted colleague to fill in, and that person’s contact information needs to be on your auto-responder. I’ve done this multiple times with good results; clients appreciate it and I’ve never lost a client by doing this.
  • Be realistic about how long you’ll need to catch up. My favorite way to ease back in from a vacation is to give myself a day (i.e. Sunday) to catch up on e-mail and other admin tasks before I start actually translating and interpreting again. Even if you can’t do that, don’t set yourself up for a post-vacation crash by assuming that you can simultaneously catch up and start working a full schedule immediately. Allow at least some time to catch up on backlogged e-mail, at a minimum.


Corinne McKay

Maybe you need to start meditating?

Although I’ve done yoga for my whole adult life, I’m not a very Zen person. In fact, kind of the opposite. I have friends who are really into meditation, and I’ve tried it a number of times, with very limited success and a lot of frustration. Basically after about eight seconds of focusing on my breath, squirrel brain would set in: Are we out of laundry detergent? What’s that noise in the hallway? Is the cat bored? That kind of thing.

And then… Back in November, I started having some significant anxiety issues, due to general life stress, the pandemic, and juggling all of the above plus work and my grad school program (which I love, so I didn’t want to drop anything!). I’m generally a pretty non-anxious person, and never had physical anxiety symptoms in my life. And all of a sudden there I was: racing heart, racing thoughts, shaking hands, having trouble sleeping, having trouble concentrating, feeling like I couldn’t breathe, the whole deal. I knew that if I couldn’t dial back the external stressors, I had to bump up my own coping skills, so I decided to try meditation. I’ve now meditated every day since December 6, and it’s honestly made a huge difference. Of course, no coping skill exists in isolation, and in addition to meditating, the external stressors have gotten a lot less intense. But I’m now a huge fan of meditation. A number of changes that I’ve noticed:

  • Meditation is a subtle, incremental thing. It’s not like when you start lifting weights, and within a couple of weeks you’re seeing some major changes in your body. At first, I mostly noticed an absence of unpleasant symptoms, rather than a presence of pleasant symptoms, if that makes sense. Like, “Oh, wow, today is actually pretty off the rails and I’m not having trouble functioning.” My physical anxiety symptoms are completely gone, which makes life a lot more enjoyable.
  • After five months of meditating every day, I mainly notice that my thoughts feel slower and quieter. That may sound weird if you’ve never meditated, but I mean that I’m more able to pause and respond, rather than reflexively react to things. Or even think, “Hmmm. What do I want to do about that? Do I need to do anything?” rather than “OH MY GOSH HERE COMES ANOTHER DISASTER, TIME TO FREAK OUT.”
  • Another big change I notice is more of a feeling of observing my own thoughts rather than being immersed in them. I notice this in very practical ways. One of my goals in my interpreting practice sessions is to “blacklist” certain words, i.e. never start a sentence with “If…” “And…” or “But…,” because then I’m often backed into a corner that I can’t get out of. And before meditation, I had a very hard time doing that: the word was out of my mouth before I even felt it coming. Now I’m still not at 100% avoidance of those words, but I have more of a sense of, “Here comes the urge to start a sentence with ‘If…” Better rephrase that.” I honestly think it’s made a big difference in my interpreting.
  • I feel more tolerant of my own and other people’s negative emotions. One of my problems in life is excess positivity, to the point of thinking that everything is surely fine, when it’s surely not fine. Meditation has helped me take more of an accepting approach to things that are not fine: to see difficult emotions for what they are — feelings that just exist on the spectrum of feelings, rather than feelings that need to be fixed.

If you’d like to start meditating, here are my admittedly not-expert tips:

  • Start with a small amount of time, but many times a week. A lot of evidence suggests that you have to meditate at least five times a week to see the benefits, and I’d agree with that. I started with five minutes a day, seven days a week.
  • If, like me, you’ve tried and failed at meditation before, I’d suggest doing guided meditations where the narrator talks the whole time, so that you have something to focus on besides your breath. I know, real meditators can sit there and focus on their breath for days at a time, but I definitely cannot. You could start with a five-minute meditation podcast, of which there are a number available on any podcast app.
  • There are also tons of free guided meditations on YouTube. I like The Honest Guys, and I’ve honestly (haha!) probably done Tess Whitehurst’s meditation to clear limiting beliefs at least 50 times.
  • My go-to now is the Calm app, and narrator Jeff Warren’s meditations called The Daily Trip. As the name suggests, there’s a new one every day, and it’s 10-15 minutes. I love Jeff’s voice and his approach to meditation; I honestly find Calm’s main narrator a bit saccharine, but I love Jeff.
  • I found it helpful to integrate meditation into my daily routine. I meditate as soon as I get to my office on weekdays (don’t even turn on the computer beforehand), and right after I eat breakfast on weekends. I always sit in the same spot (I just sit on the floor, nothing fancy) and use earbuds so that I don’t get a lot of ambient noise.

If you’re into meditation, or if you try it, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!


Corinne McKay

June four-week course: Spanish to English translation workshop

One of Training for Translators’ most popular courses, Spanish to English translation workshop, with Holly Mikkelson, is back! From June 2-28 (early bird discounts through May 21), join Holly — professor emerita at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey — for four weeks of intensive instruction for intermediate Spanish to English translators. The focus will be on legal and international trade documents, and on developing your Spanish to English translation skills in general. See the course registration page for full details!