Finding practice material

It may sound like stating the obvious, but the best type of material to practise from is the spoken word. But beware, many of conferences, debates and parliamentary & committee meetings available online may be far too difficult for you in the early stages of your interpreting course, and therefore not useful to interpret from. sto be useful.

Speech repositories

Institutional channels

Most institutions (national and international) these days show some of their proceedings online. Below are just a few examples. You can find similar sites for most countries and most languages.

The following general pointers apply to pretty much all conference interpreting languages. Just enter types of event and topics into a search engine and you will find any number of recordings to listen to or practise interpreting from.

Conferences recorded online

University lectures online

Parliaments’ multimedia archives

Create speeches

And finally… don’t be afraid to create speeches for each other, or to simplify some of the speeches you will find throught the links on this page. Taking consecutive notes from a transcript and reading back those notes as a speech is one way of arriving of creating speech material that is suitable for beginner interpreters.

The transcripts of speeches will be much more useful to you than newspaper articles or texts found on the net because they will have been written with the following in mind – the speaker will be in the same room as his or her audience. It is first-hand, old-fashioned, real communication. As such the style will not be the same as in an essay or an article.

The bottom line is very simple…just type “ministerial speeches” (or words to that effect in the language of your choice) into google. Here is a brief selection for English Here are a few ideas to get you started.

EU Commission on Why students should create speeches

Using register 2

The following ideas are taken from Alan Perlman’s excellent book “Writing Great Speeches”.  In it he makes very simple, but useful suggestions as to how to change between registers when speaking. Native speakers of English probably do all this already without thinking about it, but it will be useful for those of you with English B to see a few “tricks” that you can use.

The basic suggestion is that if you wish to be more formal in your register you should use a more impersonal language when speaking, and if you want to be less formal, a more personal one.

Impersonal = abstract  (ie suffixes -tion, -ity, -ness, -ing)modernisation of the business is proceeding
Personal = who’s doing whatwe are modernising the business
Impersonal = “done to”200 people were hired
Personal = doingwe hired 200 people
Impersonal = compound nounsa petrol tax increase
Personal = short nouns joined by prepositionsan increase in the tax on petrol
Impersonal = keep prepositions with their pronouns/nounsthis is a problem with which we are all familiar
Personal = split them upthis is a problem that we are all familiar with
Impersonal = don’t use contractionsIt will be a tough year
Personal = use contractionsIt’ll be a tough year