{"id":575,"date":"2015-02-16T13:07:49","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T13:07:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.switch2.it\/?p=575"},"modified":"2015-02-16T13:09:48","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T13:09:48","slug":"written-speeches-and-interpreting-to-write-or-not-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.switch2.it\/en\/written-speeches-and-interpreting-to-write-or-not-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"Written speeches and interpreting: to write or not to write?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to handle written speeches in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting<\/h2>\n

\"written<\/a>Do you know\u00a0that moment when\u00a0–\u00a0a few days before an interpreting job\u00a0–\u00a0you receive a miraculous phone call or email going like:\u00a0“Hi Sara, we finally received the written speech for the conference<\/strong>\u201c and you think: “Yay! That\u2019s wonderful!\u201c and then\u00a0you open the attachment and see the most complicated and dense<\/strong> speech you have ever read or translated, and you start sweating because you can immediately figure out the speaker\u2019s pace – no mercy for the interpreters in the booth, reading at a 300-words-per-second pace\u2026?<\/p>\n

If you do, then I have two\u00a0important news for you:<\/p>\n

The good one is that you, my dear conference interpreter, are lucky enough to have some documents to study for your assignment. The bad news is that you have to decide what to do with the text: translate it completely or just go through it and jot down a few keywords for your interpretation.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

To write or not to write, this is the question<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What do you usually do when you receive a very dense written speech that a speaker will read out during a conference? Is it recommendable to jot down a written translation or just a few keywords?<\/p>\n

The fact is that sometimes\u00a0it helps having a reference text while you are interpreting, sometimes it doesn’t<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I have recently experienced this in both simultaneous and consecutive interpreting.<\/p>\n

In consecutive interpreting, I was quite nervous due to the presence of a large audience and the solemnity of the event I was working at\u00a0and, having the written speech, I was trying to follow it in order to avoid note taking and to rely on sight translation as much as I could, but the speaker did of course not follow the written speech<\/strong> and I had to take consecutive notes on\u00a0borders and empty spaces on the paper sheet\u00a0I received\u00a0–\u00a0which was quite uncomfortable and messy. In that case, however, I just highlighted and translated a\u00a0few words for a quicker delivery.<\/p>\n

As to simultaneous interpreting,\u00a0I have\u00a0been working at a conference where one of the main speeches was held by a German representative reading out a written text we received in advance (3-4 days earlier). The text was 23 pages long and was a very tough article\u00a0filled with specific legal jargon.<\/p>\n

In that case I decided – together with my booth-mate – to translate the whole text in advance<\/strong>, just to be on the safe side. The idea wasn\u2019t bad at all. We basically split the text into 2 parts and we translated one part each. To do it quickly, I opted for sight translation, plus dictation app<\/strong> – in order to have a basic written text that I would edit and improve later on.<\/p>\n

When the conference day came\u00a0and when our speaker began delivering his talk\u00a0we weren\u2019t able to switch microphones in order to read our parts respectively, so we basically swapped parts. Which was not that bad, the only problem was of course that we were less familiar with the part\u00a0that was not translated by ourselves. In the end, our written translations saved us, as the speaker\u2019s pace was really too fast not to lose something\u00a0and we did manage to keep up thanks to our translated document. In addition to that, the colleagues from the other booths were listening to\u00a0our relay, which made our delivery even more important.<\/p>\n

In that case, however it would have been very useful to have a bilingual text<\/strong> (which we didn\u2019t think of, we only had a German version and an Italian one, in separate sheets)\u00a0to be able to follow the source speech better, as the speaker jumped from a paragraph to another and skipped some parts.<\/p>\n

To conclude, my question is: what are the available tools to draft a booth-friendly bilingual document?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course the obvious solution would be using a CAT tool and save (or print out) a copy of the two-column bilingual text before cleaning, but do you know any other programs and\/or easy solutions that make it possible to have a bilingual text with overlapping lines? In other words, some solution that would enable to do what I would do on a paper sheet: use double spacing and write target text manually in the space between source text lines\u00a0(like in the picture). This would be useful for PDF files or image files you cannot\u00a0easily\/quickly modify.<\/p>\n

One of the tools I use to study and annotate PDF files\u00a0is Preview on my Mac, more specifically by using the functions NOTES, TEXT and\u00a0HIGHLIGHT (you can find\u00a0more here <\/a>and here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"annotating<\/a><\/div>\n

What\u2019s your 2 cents? do you have any\u00a0favourite\u00a0tools to annotate or any other useful studying methods?<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to handle written speeches in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting Do you know\u00a0that moment when\u00a0–\u00a0a few days before an interpreting job\u00a0–\u00a0you receive a miraculous phone call or email going like:\u00a0“Hi Sara, we finally received the written speech for the conference\u201c and you think: “Yay! That\u2019s wonderful!\u201c and then\u00a0you open the attachment and see the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-simultaneous-interpreting"],"yoast_head":"\nWritten speeches and interpreting: to write or not to write? - Switch2.it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.switch2.it\/en\/written-speeches-and-interpreting-to-write-or-not-to-write\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Written speeches and interpreting: to write or not to write? - Switch2.it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How to handle written speeches in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting Do you know\u00a0that moment when\u00a0–\u00a0a few days before an interpreting job\u00a0–\u00a0you receive a miraculous phone call or email going like:\u00a0“Hi Sara, we finally received the written speech for the conference\u201c and you think: “Yay! 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