Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Interpreting


Corinne McKay

First month as a Master’s in Conference Interpreting student

Life for me took a big turn in August; I’ve been contemplating going back to school for a Master’s in Conference Interpreting for at least five years, and I’ve looked at all of the AIIC-listed Master’s in conference interpreting (MCI) programs in the US, Canada, and Switzerland (because my husband is a citizen there). But it’s complicated: we’re not prepared to move to Europe right this red-hot second. There are only five AIIC-listed MCI programs in North America, and for my purposes only four (MIIS, U. Maryland, Ottawa, and Glendon/York), because the Wake Forest program doesn’t offer French.

August 2020: A major pivot

In August of this year, I participated in the two-week Cambridge Conference Interpretation Course (CCIC; held online this year), because I thought it would give me some insight into whether to forge ahead with my MCI goals. And just a few days into the CCIC, I found out that the Glendon College/York University MCI program–which typically holds the first year online and the second year in person in Toronto–would be entirely online this year, and that they were still taking applications to start in September. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the CCIC gave me the confidence to try the advanced entry exam, to be admitted directly into the second year of the program. I took it and passed, filled out all of the paperwork to formally apply to to the program, and was accepted just in time for orientation day at the beginning of September.

This was a major logistical whirlwind, but I felt that being able to do an MCI program in one year, mostly online (we will hopefully be in Toronto for part of second semester, but the details are up in the air due to COVID) was too good to pass up. Essentially I decided that if I ever want to do this, now is the time. The Glendon/York program has the advantage of being extremely affordable (about US $16,000 per year), mostly because Canadian public university tuition is very affordable by US standards, and additionally because the Canadian dollar is trading at about 75 US cents right now. So, in the space of less than a month, I went from not even seriously considering an MCI program to being enrolled.

The structure of the Glendon program

Glendon offers an MCI for students who have English paired with French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, German, Portuguese, and Turkish, but this year there aren’t any German, Portuguese, or Turkish classes. Year 1 of the program focuses on court, conference, and healthcare interpreting, and Year 2 exclusively on conference interpreting. In my Year 2 group, we have about 20 people, and French is the largest language group.

We have some non-language-specific classes all together, and then some language-specific classes, and each class meets once a week for either two or three hours. The two-hour classes run for the whole semester, and the three-hour classes are “intensives,” where normally the instructor would come to Glendon and teach a 36-hour class in one week, but this year it’s split into 12 three-hour sessions online. Right now I have six classes:

  • Two non-language-specific classes, one on general conference interpreting topics like speech prep, structural analysis, English note-taking, etc., and one on interpreting current events, where we take turns (in groups) making speeches in our A (native) languages that other students then interpret into their A or B languages for the whole class.
  • One French into English class, where we do both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, either with the whole French group or in pairs in breakout rooms
  • Two English into French classes, one a semester-long class that’s pretty similar to the French into English class, and one an “intensive” class where we meet for three hours a week and work in depth on one speech, interpreting segments for the group and then giving each other feedback.

All of our classes meet on Zoom, and we have WhatsApp groups both for our whole year, and for our language-specific groups.

How it’s going so far

In a word: great! I love it. Of course, that’s with the caveat that remote school is remote school: definitely a different experience than being on campus (an experience I’m sharing with my college freshman daughter who is also remote!). It’s a lot of screen time, and I’m really hoping that we’ll be on campus for at least part of second semester. But Glendon has the advantage of having the online learning model pretty dialed in, as their first year has always been online.

Our professors are universally excellent, and the other students in the program are very diligent and motivated. The skills we learn are very practical, with a smattering of interpretation theory and history thrown in. All of our professors are also working conference interpreters, so they give us insights from the real world of interpreting, and we have the opportunity (starting up this week!) to interpret for a lot of in-house events at York University, which I think will be a very useful experience.

It goes without saying that the program is a lot of work, and it requires a lot of self-discipline, because most of the work outside class is self-directed, meaning that no one is standing over you telling you that you’d better do your memory exercises or your half-hour of shadowing or whatever. Sort of like what I’d imagine music school students have to do, a lot of the work of an MCI program is simply putting in the practice time, and knowing how to practice in a targeted way. I practice by myself a lot of the time (and record myself), but I make a point of practicing with other people from the program as well, preferably doing a “feedback trade” with someone who is French A, where they interpret into English and I give them feedback, then I interpret into French and they give me feedback.

The Glendon program has a pretty strong emphasis on consecutive interpreting, which is really helpful for me as I have very little formal training in consecutive. If you’re a complete beginner, I highly recommend the Interpretrain self-paced online course. It helped me a lot in preparing for the state court interpreter certification exam, but it’s geared toward utterances of a few sentences (which is enough for something like a court interpreting exam), whereas in the MCI program we’re expected to interpret speeches of around five minutes in consecutive. In just one month, my consecutive has really improved because we do so much of it, and I feel that it’s had a spill-over effect (in a positive way) on my simultaneous interpreting, because I’m more systematic and less frantic. At the start of the course, I had what might best be described as a “stenographic” style of note-taking, where I frantically tried to write down almost everything the speaker said, in abbreviated words. I’ve finally made a breakthrough and started taking fewer notes, using more symbols, and using my notes to cue my memory rather than trying to note down every single word.

Also, I’m not 22 years old (hardly! I’m 49!) and I feel like I fit in well in the Glendon program. Many of the people in the program are around my age, have a significant amount of work experience, and are continuing to work at least part-time during the program. My sense (although I may be wrong) is that this is probably pretty different from a European program where the bulk of the students would be in their 20s.

My advice for other prospective MCI students

Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the MCI life, I highly recommend it, if you find a program that works with your goals and any constraints you may have. Most of all, I think it will be interesting to see whether the big-name MCI programs continue to offer fully-online programs once the COVID pandemic has resolved. But if you’re considering an MCI program, I would consider:

  • Your budget and location. With only five MCI programs in North America, it’s a big commitment unless the fully-remote offerings continue. If you decide to go to law school, it’s likely that you can find a program you can commute to, unless you live in a really rural area. With an MCI program, not so much. And when I thought realistically about the financial commitment of moving to another state or country for two years, potentially taking out student loans, etc., plus the logistics (my husband has a salaried job here in Colorado, we own a house, my 18 year old lives nearby while doing remote school, my parents who are in their 70s moved here to be closer to us, etc.), I just wasn’t sure that it was realistic. Paying $15,000, divided into three payments of $5,000 throughout the year, felt a lot more manageable.
  • Your level of self-discipline. I think this is a huge factor, especially in a remote program. Getting better at interpreting is like getting better at playing a musical instrument: it happens incrementally, over a long period of time, through targeted practice. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and how to practice is a huge part of it; being willing to give and accept feedback is a huge part of it; and just putting your rear end in the chair and putting in the time is a huge part of it. And you have to be realistic about whether you’re going to do that, or whether you’re going to just do your 15 hours of class a week and then forget about it.

I’ll post further updates about my experiences as the year goes on! For now, I’m really enjoying the program and learning a lot.


Corinne McKay

What I’ve learned from remote court interpreting

Since passing the Colorado French court interpreter certification exam almost exactly a year ago, I’ve been interpreting two to four times a week in the Colorado state courts. I love the work, and I’m not saying that just in case one of my managing interpreters reads this. At first, my goal was simply to pass the court interpreter certification exam to prove to myself that I could do it (hello, imposter syndrome). But lo and behold, I find court work both fascinating and fulfilling; I love learning about the legal system and feeling like I’m serving as a bridge between French-speakers and the legal system. I just love everything about it.

The last in-person interpreting job I did was on Monday, March 16: a fairly lengthy hearing in a little town out on the Colorado plains. Pandemic-wise, things were heating up. Everyone had to wash their hands before entering the courtroom, and the clerks were religiously bleach-wiping every surface in the room. Still, we either didn’t really know and didn’t really want to accept what was coming down the pike: I sat right between the defendant and the public defender, handing pens and papers back and forth and certainly not socially distancing. Since then, I’ve still done a couple of court interpreting assignments every week, but they have all been remote: either over the actual telephone, or using Webex. Most of these have been brief hearings, first appearances, or status conferences; the Colorado state courts have put all jury trials on hold, and even longer proceedings like motions hearings have mostly been postponed until September at the earliest.

Pre-pandemic, I had some questions about the Colorado courts’ emphasis on in-person interpreting. Court interpreters here are paid for travel time (at half rate) and mileage, and there are only three certified French court interpreters in the state, so in some cases I’m driving an hour or more each way, sometimes for an appearance that might last five minutes. I sometimes wondered, is this really necessary? Might some of this be better handled remotely?

In some cases, remote court interpreting has worked really well, and it certainly expedites things. The court staff work really hard to keep things running smoothly, and in most cases, the remote systems work well enough that the hearings can happen. It’s a far better option than delaying everything until it’s safe to go back to the courthouses in person. However, I’ve now become a much bigger fan of in-person interpreting–in fact I cannot wait to get back to in-person interpreting, for various reasons:

  • Simple things like not being able to hear someone become a huge issue. I’ve interpreted for people who were driving, sitting outside in public places, or in a house with a lot of background noise, making it incredibly hard to understand them.
  • People talking over each other is another huge issue. Especially when you’re on the phone with no video, there’s really no way to get someone to stop talking, other than to try to tell them to stop, or to start talking over them.
  • The remote process seems like it would expedite everything, but in some cases it doesn’t. An example is when people call in to a Webex conference on the telephone rather than from a computer, so their phone number appears instead of their name on the meeting ID. This then requires someone (usually a court clerk or the judge) to go through each phone number, read the number out loud, and ask the person to un-mute themselves and say who they are, i.e. “Calling from 333-333-3333, this is Jack Smith and I’m the father of the victim in the Jones case.”
  • Confidentiality: I’ve interpreted for a few family court hearings that clearly would have been confidential if they were happening in person. In one case, one of the parties’ children were clearly visible in the background of the video call while custody issues were being discussed, including details that the children really should not have been hearing. Children are prohibited from courtrooms, but I don’t see how it would be possible to require a party to a case to get child care in order to take a video call.
  • Appearances: Lots of people don’t show up to remote hearings; anecdotally, the no-show rate seems much higher to me than the no-show rate for in-person hearings. Which raises the question: If you don’t show up to a remote hearing because your phone battery died or you can’t figure out how to use Webex, should that constitute failure to appear? Neither option seems like a good one: if it does constitute failure to appear, is it really fair for someone to face an additional charge because their phone battery died? If it doesn’t constitute failure to appear, what prevents people from simply not showing up, and claiming that they couldn’t log on to the remote system?
  • Public participation and oversight: The fact that most court cases are public is a really important component of the US legal system. I spent hours sitting in court and taking notes when I was studying for the court interpreter exam, and you see all kinds of people (reporters, family members, law students, court reporting students, interpreting students) observing in court. Family court cases and some others are closed to the public, but in my experience it’s quite common to see people watching court proceedings just for their own interest or education. In a remote system, it’s not always clear how or if the public can participate.
  • The simple fact of people not being in the same room causes some hassles: On several occasions I’ve needed to sight-translate things like plea agreements. Those have to be sent by e-mail, sometimes through multiple people instead of being passed across a table. Then the defendants often have to sign the agreements via Docusign, which can be complicated since they’re often using a phone rather than a computer. In order to maintain the proper flow of information (defendant-interpreter-district attorney-interpreter-defendant), the interpreter has to interpret all of those technical questions (“I don’t see where I have to sign,” “There’s no yellow box,” “The submit button isn’t working”) rather than someone helping the person right there.

In many situations, I think that remote court interpreting falls into the “better than no interpreting” category. If everyone is patient and the technical side works out, things can go pretty well. Using a purpose-built RSI platform, which at least some court systems are looking into, would make things even better. Still, I’m now more convinced of the merits of bringing an interpreter from an hour away to interpret for even short appearances, and I’m looking forward to getting back to that at some point in the perhaps-distant but hopefully possible future!


Corinne McKay

Resources for practicing French interpreting

As I mentioned on a recent Speaking of Translation podcast about goal-setting, one of my medium-term goals is to improve my French interpreting skills. Because…well…everyone needs one big, crazy dream, and this is mine. Back in the day (think 2002-2003ish), I did a small amount of interpreting work and really enjoyed it. However I let it drop because it wasn’t very compatible with working from home when my now-teenage daughter was little. Flash forward 13 years, and I’m working toward getting back into interpreting. Because I’m a goal-oriented person, I’ve set a goal of perhaps taking the State (State of Colorado, not Department of State) court interpreter exam in 2019 or 2020.

So…what does this kind of effort look like? Is there hope for a 46 year-old translator with once-solid but now-rusty spoken French and very minimal interpreting skills? The jury’s still out on that, but in the meantime I thought it might be helpful to share some of the resources I’m using, and resources that other people have suggested. And whether or not you are interested in interpreting, perhaps you can apply some of these tips to your own goals.

My first resource recommendation is a person: Athena Matilsky, a Federally-certified Spanish court interpreter and State-certified French court interpreter who currently lives in Quebec. This whole endeavor was sparked by my attending Athena’s presentation on memory development for consecutive interpreting at last year’s ATA conference. I had two realizations there: first, that I could actually (kinda-sorta) do some of the exercises, and second, that I needed to follow my own mantra: when is someday? If I’m thinking of working on my interpreting skills “someday,” when is that?

Armed with those two epiphanies, I started doing one-on-one coaching with Athena about once a month. We started out by talking about interpreting and about my goals, and now we actually practice interpreting during the sessions. It’s extremely helpful, and Athena also has great resources on her website, such as French-English audio glossaries (I am very bad at these, but I do them while I’m folding laundry or washing the dishes), Quizlet slide decks that you can use to test yourself, and links to various other specialized glossaries.

Athena also runs a Facebook group called French Interpreting Corner, which is a great forum to share resources.

If you’re studying for any flavor of court interpreting exam, your Bible is going to be Acebo, and their flagship product The Interpreter’s Edge. This takes you through the three modes of interpreting that you need to master (simultaneous, consecutive, and sight), and includes instructional material, memory development exercises, and interpreting exercises. If you’re lucky, Acebo will have a language-specific study set for your language. Otherwise, you’ll use the Generic edition and interpret into your other language. There is no Acebo set specifically for French, so I use the Generic edition and it’s still very helpful, it just involves a lot of dictionary searches for the many court-related terms that I don’t know.

Portuguese translator and interpreter Cris Silva sent me some very helpful resources:

Tamara Muroiwa, a Spanish-English translator and interpreter in the UK, sent me a great resource for conference interpreting. It’s ORCIT: online resources for conference interpreter training, and is essentially a free, self-paced online course for beginning conference interpreters or those wanting to brush up their skills. The course includes video lectures and practice exercises. Additionally, the course itself is available in English, Czech, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Spanish. If you work in one of those languages, it presents the opportunity to develop your interpreting skills and your language skills by doing the course in that language.

Finally, no mention of interpreter resources would be complete without Speechpool. Speechpool is a community-driven repository of speeches in various languages. Each speech has some helpful identifying information (i.e. the speaker’s native language or accent, the subject matter of the speech, a community rating of the speech’s difficulty, etc.). One nice thing about Speechpool is that it deliberately includes speeches recorded by non-native speakers; a situation that certainly occurs in an interpreter’s real life but not often in interpreter training materials.

Wherever you are on the interpreting journey, I highly recommend the podcast Troublesome Terps for some much-needed insight and levity. Hosted by conference interpreters Alexander Drechsel, Alexander Gansmeier and Jonathan Downie (yes, they know that they’re a “manel” in a female-dominated profession, and they have a sense of humor about that too..), the podcast covers topics from the thought-provoking (machine interpreting), to the absurd (interpreting President Trump), to the enlightening and humorous (dream and nightmare booth-mates). You can listen on their website or subscribe to them wherever you get your podcasts.

Readers, over to you: other thoughts on interpreting resources or big, crazy dreams?


Corinne McKay

Link: Barry Olsen reviews an automated interpreting earpiece

Do you subscribe to Jost Zetzsche’s Tool Box Journal newsletter? If not, you should. It’s a monthly roundup of all things language technology-related. I always feel that Jost tracks translation technology so that I don’t have to: instead of combing through hundreds of articles, I just read the Tool Box. This is not an affiliate deal; but if you do subscribe to the Tool Box, do the right thing and pay the voluntary $17 per year subscription fee. It takes a lot of time to put a publication like this together, and you can afford $17 for that if you’re going to read it.

In the most recent Tool Box Journal, I particularly enjoyed Barry’s Olsen’s Tech-Savvy Interpreter column, in which he demos and reviews an automated interpreting earpiece, the Lingmo Translate One2One. I found this fascinating, for a few reasons:
-As I said on Twitter, lots of people like to eye-roll and yell about automated interpreting devices (“Worthless and a joke!” “Will put all interpreters out of a job!” and everything in between), but very few people actually test these things to see how they work.
-In my experience, most translators and interpreters focus on the accuracy/inaccuracy of automated translation and interpreting tools, to the detriment of every other feature. And it’s not all about accuracy: usability is a huge factor as well. Barry delves into this–the Lingmo earpiece is essentially a smartwatch that hangs off your ear, and it must be worn on the right ear. Thus, what happens if you prefer your left ear? Or if you are deaf or hard of hearing in your right ear? Or if you don’t feel like roaming around Paris with a smartwatch on your ear? Seemingly small issues like this can make a huge difference.
-Personally, I’m really curious about what automated translation and interpreting tools can actually do. I actually find it fun to pit DeepL against my own work and see how I measure up. I think these kinds of benchmarking tests are really interesting, so I quite enjoyed this article.


Corinne McKay

How I passed the Federal Court Interpreter Certification Examination (FCICE)

This is a guest post by Judy Jenner. Judy is a federally certified Spanish court interpreter and a long-time German and Spanish translator specialized in legal, business, marketing, and e-commerce. She runs her boutique translation and interpreting business, Twin Translations, with her twin sister Dagy. They are the authors of the business book “The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation,” which has sold more than 5,000 copies. Find Judy on Twitter (@language_news) and on the Translation Times blog.

How I passed the Federal Court Interpreter Certification Examination (FCICE)

Without a doubt, the federal court interpreter certification examination (known by its acronym, FCICE) is the one of the most feared interpreting exams in the country – and while it is the one with the lowest pass rate, it doesn’t have to be scary. I am happy to report on my experience and tell you how I passed the oral portion the second time around.

First off: this is a very difficult exam, but it’s not impossible to pass it. The oral portion is offered every two years in some 15 cities across the country. You don’t have to be perfect to pass it, but you have to be very, very good. The minimum passing score is 80%, which is higher than the bar exam and most other national exams. Here are some tips, insight, and strategies that worked for me, but that, as a matter of course, might not work for everyone:

1) Take a practice exam before you decide how to focus your practice time. The exam consists of several portions: consecutive, simultaneous into Spanish (two portions; one monologue with one speaker and one with two speakers), sight translation English into Spanish, and sight translation Spanish into English. You might think that consecutive is your weakness, but when is the last time you had some hard data on this? That’s why I suggest taking at least one practice exam, and it’s also good to put yourself in a simulated testing environment to see how you handle your nerves. The University of Arizona and the National Center for State Courts have these available for sale. It’s important to have a baseline of your skills at the beginning of the study process, and you must take a hard look at your skills and evaluate them critically: is your civil law terminology weak? Should you focus on sight translation and improve your reading speed because you run out of time during that portion? Then spend your time on your weaker areas.

2) Learn as much about the exam as possible. Make sure you read all the information the FCICE provides (especially the handbook), and calm down your nerves by knowing exactly which portion of the exam is first and how the test will work. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes down to the relatively formal logistics of the exam.

3) It’s not (really) a terminology exam. I missed passing the exam the first time by a few points, and I believe it was partially related to the fact that I went down the rabbit hole of memorizing too much highly specialized terminology related to fingerprinting, forensics, DNA analysis, etc. instead of spending the time practicing actual interpreting. There is only so much time you will have to practice, and you need to use that time wisely. I found that as a state-certified court interpreter in two states who works regularly, I already knew enough judicial terminology to pass the exam, and that my time might be best spent gaining speed. That being said, if you think you need more judicial terminology, you probably do. Increasing your vocabulary involves memorization and repetition, which isn’t usually a lot of fun, but it may be necessary.

4) Interpret a wide variety of topics. While this is certainly a court interpreting exam, it’s all about speed and precision; you should train your brain to deal with unexpected terms and turns of phrase – and you do that best by exposing yourself to different topics. I am a huge fan of Speechpool and the European Union Speech Repository. TED Talks are fantastic as well, but keep in mind that these have not been recorded with interpreters in mind, so they might be faster than others – but they are great practice. I’ve interpreted speeches about artificial intelligence, hippos in Colombia, airplane food, the price of cosmetics, hedge funds, cross-country skiing, and many, many others.

5) Interpret regularly. The only way to become a better interpreter is to interpret, and to do it regularly; ideally every day. Make it a priority to make this a part of your day—like brushing your teeth. I created a spreadsheet on which I recorded every video I interpreted and jotted down terminology that was either new to me or I couldn’t interpret correctly. I suggest having a similar spreadsheet (or a journal – whatever works for you), and keep yourself honest by logging frequent entries. However, don’t set unrealistic goals. If all you can do is interpret 10 minutes every second day, then do that, but be consistent.

6) Record your renditions and ask colleagues to evaluate them. One of the best things you can do to critically evaluate your skills is to record your renditions and to listen to them right after you’ve interpreted them. I use a recording tool called Audacity. Get together with colleagues, perhaps some who are also studying for the exam, and ask them for constructive feedback. Do the same for them.

7) Take an in-person class if you can. I took short classes at two highly regarded universities – the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (formerly Monterey Institute of International Studies), where I had the opportunity to learn from two court interpreting legends, Holly Mikkelson and Esther Navarro-Hall, and another class at the University of Arizona. My tip: stick to highly regarded universities and to well-known instructors who put on their own workshops, such as Tony Rosado. I can also recommend Jumpstart for 2017, MATI’s (Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters) online classes taught by my colleague Ernesto Niño-Murcia.

8) On exam day, don’t leave anything to chance. Get to the exam location well ahead of time, and if you have never been there, you might want to visit it the day before. The exam isn’t offered in my hometown, so I had to fly to Tucson. The exams are usually held at hotels, so I thought it best to stay at the same hotel to minimize any logistical challenges. Have a snack or a light meal before the exam, warm up your voice, and interpret a video or audio file that you know well to build your confidence. This might be silly, but some of the best pre-exam advice I got is to get pumped up by singing some of your favorite songs. I sang (poorly) and danced (decently) to Timbiriche and Luis Miguel in Spanish and Morrissey in English.

9) Work on your speed. To me, the exam is mainly one of speed, and many interpreters are the most concerned about the second simultaneous portion, the one featuring two English speakers –and so was I. Focus on building speed by interpreting audio and video files that are increasingly faster. Challenge yourself and your speed will improve.

10) It’s just an exam. Don’t make this exam into more than what it is – not passing it doesn’t mean you are not a good or great interpreter, but it might mean you need to polish your skills if you want to work in the federal courts.

Best of luck, and more importantly: enjoy the process of honing your interpreting skills!