Apr 2008

Conference presentation in Łódź

I participated in the Teaching Translation and Interpreting Conference in Łódź, Poland. The title of my paper was: “Practicing isolated subskills in an advanced simultaneous interpreting course”. The abstract is below.

This paper will present an English-Polish simultaneous interpreting course taught in the final year of the two-year Conference Interpreting Programme for M.A. students at the School of English (Adam Mickiewicz University). Such a complex cognitive skill as simultaneous interpreting requires a connectionist approach based on the involvement of multiple memory components and the strengthening of multilingual lexical links in the bilingual lexicon. To fine-tune simultaneous interpreting skills of trainee interpreters, it is impossible to slow down the interpretation process because it would significantly burden their working memory capacity. Hence, trainers have to resort to other means. They have to identify and isolate specific subskills that could be practiced separately in a simultaneous interpreting course.
The paper will outline a number of teaching techniques used to develop individual subskills (such as processing of numbers, statistics, lists, proper names – conference agendas, proverbs and phrases, foreign accents, output from fast speakers, “Chinese whispers”). It will also be highlighted how e-learning solutions can help motivate students to work individually and assist teachers in developing speech repositories.