The following is taken from Consecutive Interpreting by Andrew Gillies, Routledge, 2019 (p63-64), and suggests a way of breaking down (analysing) speeches you listen to.
Section Diagrams are a continuation of the way of splitting up a speech that we’ve just seen above, in Sections. Once you have broken down a speech into sections, you can go further and break it down into sub-sections, mapping them out on a page. For each section and sub-section note a single word if possible, a few at most.
A section diagram gives a very clear visual representation of the structure of the speech and can serve as a set of notes to interpret from for a very quick speech, or a speech which you can easily remember. In the example below each hyphen in the section diagram denotes the beginning of a new section or sub-section
Example (Lumumba)
I want to just mention a few things why I think African agriculture will never be transformed unless we change. Number 1. when the Vice-President of Burundi was here the entire press corps was around. They have now gone. And what is going to be reported tomorrow in the newspapers is that he opened the conference and after that what you are doing for the next one week will never be mentioned except on 13th when the Minister for Agriculture will be closing. That is Africa’s tragedy, number 1.
Number 2. The other reason why I don’t think we’ll go far – and with all due respect to those who are funding this organisation, it is DFID, USID, all non-African insitutions. I invite you to read Dambio Moyo’s ‘Dead Aid’ . Africa will go nowhere as long as Africa depends on friends of goodwill who’s names we keep on changing from donors to development partners we’ll never go anywhere.
Number 3. I’ve gone around here and collected a lot of literature. I can assure you that very few Africans know about the literature. In my village I’m considered a very serious farmer, which is a tragedy, because I’m not. I’m a lawyer. And as long as that continues to happen and you have these conferences where you sit and write good papers but there is no umbilical cord with the African farmer, Africa is going nowhere.
