Log book for feedback

Whether doing consecutive or simultaneous you will constantly be correcting yourself or being corrected by your peers and your teachers. In order to improve it is worth giving some thought to the types of comments made about your work, recording those comments and acting on them.

Recording comments, or feedback, in an ordered, deliberate fashion is infinitely more useful than writing down what is said to you on any piece of paper you have to hand in the mistaken assumption that you will ever look at it again.

Try keeping an exercise book or notepad in which you note all these comments and only these comments as and when they are made. Note the date of each session when you start and you will immediately create a chronological record of which problems crop up again and again and which ones were more of a one-off, which ones you have corrected for good and which ones you thought had gone away but which have returned. This will help you to see at a glance and then concentrate on what is really important to your development without wasting time on things that are less useful to you personally.

In the same vein split the book into two parts. Distinguish between “generative” and “non-generative” feedback. 

What does this mean? Generative is a phrase used most often in ELT teaching and describes recurring events. Patterns or, for the interpreter, issues of technique. A single problem that crops up many times and which therefore once corrected will have a larger impact on the quality of the interpretation is more interesting than a single one-off mistake. For example if we agree to stop saying “err” while working, this is generative because this one idea can lead to the correction of dozens of individual instances of the “err” noise. Other generative issues will be, correct sentence intonation, speaking skills, reformulation techniques from one language to another (for example, a strategy for German’s “involved” sentences, or sentences beginning “Si” in French) and so on.

Non-generative feedback means one-offs, so for example corrections of specific content. “1993 not 1994” for example or “you said ‘Directive’ instead of ‘Regulation’ “. These comments may be justified but they are less efficient in terms of improving your interpreting in general. They are non-generative and therefore should be accorded less attention than generative issues. (Beware though, as often such apparently lone mistakes are the result of some technique flaw, in which case you must identify the flaw and log it with the other technique issues under “generative”).

Enjoy!

Using Audacity for dual-track recording of interpreting practice

(for a Mac)

This file is more a set of instructions than a description. But in brief Audacity allows a trainer to

1) listen asynchronously to both interpreting and source speech at the same time and

2) add feedback into the same file, with the feedback directly associated to the part of the interpreting in refers to.

There are two stages to get you to a dual track (both source speech and the interpreting in a single recording).

  • 1. Convert Youtube speeches to MP3
  • 2. Record interpreting over the original speech as a second track.

Convert Youtube speeches to MP3

1. Go to your Youtube film and copy the URL

2. Go to https://ymp4.download

3. Paste the Youtube film URL and click on the format you want (eg. MP3 320kbps)

4. Click „download” and then again on the new green “download” button that will appear

5. The downloaded MP3 file will appear in your Downloads folder

Record interpreting over the original speech as a second track

Download, install and open Audacity.

To interpret

2. Drag and drop MP3 file of source speech into Audacity window.

3. Click on Tracks menu

4. Choose        Add new

                        Stereo track

(Put the microphone volume up high and speaker volume relatively low. These are both underneath the green play button)

5. Press red record button to start interpreting

6. Stop interpreting

7. File/ Export

Teacher, to listen and give feedback.

Feedback in the audio recording

9. Click on Tracks menu

10. Choose      Add new

                        Label track

11. Click the part of the recording to which the feedback comment relates

12. To add a new label

            Edit Menu

            Labels

            Label at selection

            click where you want to add a comment

            type text into box provided

13. Repeat 12 for each feedback comment.

14. Save project as an Audacity .au file

– Once you record the “project” you can still edit the feedback The result looks like this:

Sending the project to a student

You need to send both the .au file and the _data folder of the same name (eg. Peter.au & Peter_data) for the student to be able to open the file at the other end. It’s a very big file! When they open the .au file it must inside the same folder as the _data folder.

15. To compress the file and folder into a zip file

Mark the file and folder and (ctrl + click) or (right click) on them. Choose “compress”. A .zip file will be created

16. Share the .zip file with your student… eg. via Gdocs

(It’s a very big file… approx 130MB for 10min speech)

When you play back the project you might not immediately see your feedback as it is later down the folder.

NB. My limited experience when listening with Audacity is that it pushes us towards very detailed micro-commentary. So it is well worth listening to the interpreting again as a whole, almost ignoring the original, to get that overall impression back.

Practice tips Gillies

The following text is taken from Conference Interpreting – A Student’s Practice Book by Andrew Gillies (p11-14) Routledge,  2013

How to Practice

One cannot achieve a high level of competence in interpreting only by attending time-tabled interpreting classes. That’s why students have to practise outside class time

Heine 1989:164


A.1    Practise often

Practise often. 5 days per week is a reasonable timetable. That’s often enough to mean you never get out of practise, and you continue getting better. But practising a lot doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to some rest time. 

A.2     Practise in short sessions

Be aware that practising twice for thirty minutes in one day, morning and then afternoon, may be  better than one session of 1 hour. And that one hour per day for a week is definitely better than 7 hours practice on one day and nothing for the rest of the week.

A.3     Don’t only interpret 

If you are a student interpreter, you probably love interpreting. And if you have the choice between any type of course work or practice and actually interpreting, you will choose interpreting every time. But practice does not have to be interpreting to be useful. So treat yourself to non-interpreting practice activities on a regular basis. You’ll find plenty of them in this book.

A.4    Practise skills in isolation

It is possible to break interpreting down into its component skills and practise them in isolation, or some but not all of them at the same time. This is the concept underlying much of this book. So read on! 

Source: Van Dam 1989: 170, Weber 1989:164, Seleskovitch and Lederer (1989: 133), Moser Mercer 1994:66, Gillies 2001:66

A.5     Practise with an aim

Set yourself an aim for each practise session.  For example, ‘Today (or this week) I’m going to concentrate on good delivery.” Early in the course the skills your practice should probably reflect the content of your lessons. Many courses, for example, teach delivery and memory skills first and, say, note-taking later. You can practise a new skill in each practise session or for a few days or weeks at a time. This has the advantage also of giving you interim goals to aim at, and achieve.  This allows us to see progress being made. And this is likely to increase your motivation levels. Not least of all because progress in interpreting as a whole is very difficult to see over short periods. We might notice an improvement between January and April, but it is unlikely that you’ll see a tangible improvement in your work from one week to the next. If you practise delivery skills, for example, in isolation, you can make significant and visible progress in a matter of days or weeks.

Source: Gillies 2001:66

A.6    Think about your work

Take time out to think about your interpreting performance, and discuss it with others.  Learning comes not only from doing, but from thinking about what you’ve done. Only you can actually learn, noone else can learn for you. 

A.7     Take a break
Stop practising if you are getting tired. If you recognise that you are tiring, then your interpreting has probably already been less than your best for 10-15 minutes. So stop! 
    This doesn’t apply to class and exam situations of course, where you will just have to battle through. That’s also part of interpreting. But if you’re practising, it’s best to stop and come back to it when you’ve had a break.


A.8     Don’t force yourself

Interpreting requires all your effort and motivation. Anything less than 100% and you will not produce your best performance. So don’t practise if you don’t want to. And if you find that an you don’t want to practise all that often, then you know that interpreting isn’t for you. 

A.9    Start interpreting into your best language 

    Begin by learning to interpret into your best active language#. Later, when you are comfortable with that, and if you have a second active language, start practising interpreting into that language. Practise all of your language combinations.

Source: Déjean le Féal, EMCI 2002:28

A.10     Practise in groups

For most people working in groups is also more fun than working alone or in class. Groups should be of 2-4 people for consecutive: you’ll need at least one speaker and one interpreter, the speaker can double as the audience in consecutive. For simultaneous groups should be of 3-6 people. You need more people for simultaneous because the speaker cannot listen to the interpreting as they can in consecutive. That means you’ll need one speaker, one interpreter and one listener to make a group.  
There are a number of advantages to practising in groups rather than alone or only in class time. Working with other students and preparing speeches for one another means that you will have plenty of practise material (speeches) to interpret and that they will be pitched at the right level of difficulty. Speeches student interpreters give tend to be simpler in structure, logic and vocabulary than authentic speeches and this is as it should be for the first part of your course. Start simple and work up. Preparing and giving the speeches is also useful and shouldn’t be considered an exercise in altruism. As you’ll see in the exercises below, creating speeches is an exercise in understanding speech structure and note-taking while giving a speech trains note-reading and public speaking skills in isolation. 

A.11    Shake it up

Don’t always work with the same people when practising. Work with a variety of other students, not only your best friend on the course. That way you are also less likely to develop bad habits or get too used to the same speaker and speech type. 

A.12    Listen to each other

One of the simplest ways to train your ability to listen to, and monitor, your own interpreting performance is to listen to and assess those of your fellow students. It’s easier because when you are interpreting and trying to listen to yourself you’re doing several things at once, including monitoring your performance, here you are only listening and assessing, not interpreting as well. 
Always listen with particular criteria in mind, for example, is the delivery good, do the main points make sense, is the language register appropriate. And try to listen only for one or two of these criteria, and not always all of them at once.
    It’s also useful because most students make similar, and a limited number of types of, mistakes. So the person you’re listening to probably has some of the same interpreting problems as you.
    Obviously simultaneous interpreting can and should also be practised alone from recorded material (and with a dictaphone to record yourself), consecutive also if needs must, but the reactions of others, and the opportunity to listen to their work yourself are invaluable. 

Source: Heine 2000: 223 

A.13    Be a listener

The temptation with simultaneous is for lots of people to interpret the same speech, and noone to listen to the interpreting. Resist it! Don’t everyone go into the booths and interpret just because booths are free. Listeners may listen to only the interpreter, or to the interpreter and original speech simultaneously, both are valid and useful exercises. 

A.14    Work with listeners who need interpretation

 Very often we practise with people who have the same language combination as we do. And that means that their assessment of your interpreted version of a speech is influenced by their knowledge of the source language and/or their understanding of the original speech. That’s often very useful of course, but you need not always work with a listener who understands the source language. 
It is very useful to have a ‘real” listener who ‘needs” the interpreter to understand the speech. Afterwards ask them simply, if they understood what was being said. Their questions about what was not clear are often extremely helpful in highlighting the major problem areas, as opposed to minor errors that listeners who understand both the source and the target languages tend to highlight.

A.15    Get non-interpreters involved

You needn’t work only with your classmates.  Other people, family, friends, anyone who can be roped into listen will do. These listeners will often be more demanding and perhaps perceptive in their analysis of your work than you. At the very least they will offer a different point of view on it. Whether it’s fellow students or other people who are listening, the fact of having someone listen to you is important. Interpreting is about communicating between people, something one can forget when practising from recorded speech after recorded speech alone.

Practice Guide Guichot de Fortis

by Chris Guichot de Fortis
Senior Interpreter, NATO
January 2015

“You have a mind, it wants to learn. Acquire an arsenal of knowledge with which to arm yourself…our modern age is a time when learning is power….every man must know everything. Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing we use to fly…your brain must hurry to eat all the facts it can hold, before the next age of darkness.”
(Phillip Depoy – “The King James Conspiracy”)

It has become increasingly apparent to me over the years that a considerable number of students studying conference interpreting (at Master’s and other levels), find it difficult to know exactly how to proceed, and which tactics and techniques to adopt in their efforts to improve their consecutive and simultaneous techniques, and strengthen both their ‘A’ and ‘B’ languages. So, I felt it might be useful for me to provide a few hints and guidelines to help my future colleagues, which is my goal in this informal (and far from exhaustive) guide; I hope and trust that it will be of assistance both to those still engaged in their studies, and recently qualified young conference interpreters.

If you are to progress, it is important that you understand that the formal hours of teaching and training offered by your school during your interpreting studies can only be considered as simply the tiny tip of what is a complex and extensive iceberg. If you limit yourself to this ‘official’ training and practice, be advised from the start that you will have practically no chance either of passing your diploma exams or (much more importantly) of actually becoming a conference interpreter! Please divest yourself immediately of the misapprehension that simply attending classes will automatically make you into a conference interpreter – from today on, devote your energy, your willpower and your imagination to external/supplementary/independent training activities aimed at making you both competent and autonomous.

Think of your formal classes more as a chance to have regular access to experienced trainers, who will be able to observe your performance and provide advice to enable you to then go away and progress. Remember that even though Olympic athletes (and theirs, linguistically, is the level of difficulty and excellence in performance at which you are aiming) resort systematically to specialist professional trainers, these experts can only observe performance and indicate what form the athlete’s training should take. It will be the individual athlete’s muscles and tendons which will bring Olympic success, and not those of the coach – it is therefore up to the athlete to make the lengthy, focused, sustained and considered efforts which will progressively strengthen and develop muscles, resilience and technique, and lead to success in performance.

In your case, it is your own brain that you must painstakingly develop, nourishing synapses and creating the new neuronal pathways which are a prerequisite for simultaneous interpretation, and to which there are no shortcuts: there can literally be no substitute for many many hours of purposeful and targeted practice, actually carrying out the interpreting task! You may practice alone or in a group, and must regularly seek evaluations and advice from seasoned professional interpreters/pedagogues, who know where the bar is set. This professional feedback should lead to the adoption of strategies to remedy any faults identified, and this practice/feedback loop should be repeated many times.

It is usually said that, to acquire a high-level specialist skill, some 10.000 hours of deliberate practice are required. While this will indeed be necessary for you to achieve a truly expert level of performance (which should legitimately be your aim after a couple of years in the profession, if you wish to make a living from conference interpreting in a competitive world), to reach the level required to actually launch one’s career, several hundred hours (in conditions as near to those of real life as possible) should suffice!

During your practice sessions, I suggest that you draw inspiration from the text in Annex I below, detailing the training methods and strategies employed by experts and specialist performers in a variety of fields.

It is very important that you practice even a little every day (while allowing yourself a weekly day of rest!), rather than opting for less frequent but rarer but longer, intensive bursts of activity. On days when you have classes, I recommend a daily average of 90 minutes’ concentrated training, in two 45 minute slices, all disciplines included; on those days when you have no formal interpreting classes, you should at least double this amount of time. Work also at acquiring the conference interpreter’s essential skill of ‘throwing the switch’ and being able to concentrate immediately and totally on the task at hand, while relaxing just as fully when the time is right. This ability (a skill in its own right), is so frequently disregarded and/or misunderstood, but it will be the basic key to the success of your training and practice, and later to your life as a practicing professional conference interpreter.

You will find below a short list of exercises which I hope and believe will help you develop as a conference interpreter. I should add the rider that each person, each brain and each linguistic and professional profile is different – you should therefore put together a reasoned, rational and achievable study and training plan to suit your own abilities and circumstances, and stick to it even when the going gets tough (as will often be the case, trust me!). If you would like to consult me (c.guichot@aiic.net) for help in establishing a tailor-made personal training plan, I would be very happy to help if time permits:

1) Listen every day, for at least an hour, to spoken-word radio (NPR, BBC Radio 4 and World Service, for English), at times with complete focus and concentration and at times as a background to your routine activities. Whether you are an English ‘A’ or ‘B’, the advantages here are multiple:

  • –  during the ‘concentrated’ listening periods, you will improve your grasp of current affairs and geopolitics, and enhance the lexical breadth and depth of your language
  • –  at all times, in the absence of visual cues, your ears and brain will become accustomed to instinctively and rapidly seizing the meaning and cadences of the (‘C’ or ‘B’) language, and to honing active listening skills
  • –  in listening to radio speech while engaged in other relatively undemanding activities, you will train your brain to listen and extract meaning with only a part of its capacity; this is an absolute goal to be reached in simultaneous interpreting, where the brain must be free to concentrate on the more ‘noble’ core functions of interpretation, i.e. understanding, processing and transposing complex ideas.

2)  Practice simultaneous, using real-life speeches delivered by speakers who are making no concessions to the fact that you are interpreting them, and pulling no punches! Use headphones and a computer, record your work and check it afterwards; as often as possible, ask for feedback from an experienced interpreter with the relevant ‘A’ language (if need be, arrange to send sound files by email). I hope that the list of useful links in Annex II will help you here.

3)  Form a training and practice group with other students or young colleagues,: negotiate access to a room with interpreting booths (use imagination and lateral thinking, and do not take ‘no’ for an answer!) and organize regular and frequent training sessions. Attend these sessions come what may, even when tired or discouraged, as they will be a source of motivation and cross-fertilisation; while the learning curve is still steep, it is easier to struggle with others than alone. You should attend these sessions systematically, no matter how (or how confident) you are feeling mentally or physically, because others will be depending on you and your commitment. The discipline will later stand you in good stead as a professional interpreter, and will help develop your character and reliability, making you a sought- after colleague.

In your work with the practice group, every member in rotation should prepare and deliver speeches, which will also develop your self-confidence and hone other communication skills that will help you greatly in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. While working in a group, be constructive in your feedback to colleagues, but also frank and demanding. Undemanding or superficial feedback (too many schools tend to be insufficiently demanding of their students) does more harm than good, and it is only through constructive frankness that you will progress. Try hard to move beyond a simple recitation of inaccuracies and language errors, and seek to identify weaknesses in listening, concentration, reasoning and understanding, all of which will undermine successful interpretation. A further bonus here is that in learning to critique colleagues, you will also become better able to identify your own problems.

In Annex III below you will find a description of an excellent group of this type, which is primarily aimed at recent graduates. This is an example from which to draw inspiration; please take into account the intellectual property involved in the format and website of this group, and make sure to ask permission from the group organizer (listed in the Annex) before cutting and pasting any part of her work.

4)  Practice on-sight translation every day, alone or with others; fix the goal of finding (in your ‘A’ language) 5 or 6 versions of each and every sentence without hesitation, varying grammar, syntax and word order; in your ‘B’ language, your goal should be to provide 3 versions with equal speed. You can work on this exercise anywhere and at any time, using virtually any type of text, and it is indispensable for increasing the speed and flexibility of your thought processes, and your linguistic breadth and depth in all your active languages.

5)  Perform 4-minute slices of consecutive interpretation, preferably in front of an audience made up of your colleagues or of ‘pure consumers’ who have no knowledge of the source language – this is a good motivator for young interpreters, as it places them in a situation where their interpretation is truly necessary, a salutary and welcome change from the artificial circumstances in which most such tasks tend to be carried out in a learning environment.

6) Spend a considerable amount of time ‘shadowing’ (see guide at Annex IV below) elegant, flowing and convincing speeches in all your active languages (‘A’ just as much as ‘B’). Do not forget that even your mother tongue will not yet be at a level sufficient to be able to professionally interpret complex arguments and ideas. In addition, shadowing is the best possible tool for acquiring a strong ‘B’ language, so that it can be employed reflexively, confidently and convincingly: after many tens of hours of practice, this technique will help you automatically employ correct vocabulary and register in your ‘A’ language, and appropriate cadences, accent and rhythms in your ‘B’ language.

_____________________________________________________________________

ANNEX I

Article : « Elite Players’ Practice »

The Berlin Study

In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.

As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.

The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?

The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long, Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.

The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…

Decoding the Patterns of the Elite

We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music.

The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).

The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability.

This might not be surprising, as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times (c.f., Gladwell).

But the researchers weren’t done.

They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.

The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods.

When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two- sessions a day schedule.

This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives. Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the

average players.

Also consider relaxation. The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.

Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work

To summarize these results:

  • The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
  • but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
  • and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin. I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

  • Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
  • Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment. This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work. The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.