Being concise in simultaneous

Hi! Welcome to the Complete Interpreter podcast by the Interpreting Coach.

Why 'Complete Interpreter'? Because you're not just a translation machine, you're also a person and a business owner, and I hope to help you take a 360 view of yourself share some great tried-and-tested strategies to improve your interpreting skills, mindset, and marketing.

In this episode, I talk about being concise: what's the point? How can you reduce your word count (and is that REALLY what's important?).

Here a summary of my suggestions:

• Cut out repetition and redundancy
• Avoid fillers, hesitations and qualifiers (if you're a conference interpreter)
• Don't hedge (unless the speaker is doing so deliberately)
• Be mindful of your word choice; use shorter forms ('use', not 'utilise') and avoid verbose turns of phrase ('due to the fact that'...)
• avoid lengthy and complicated passive constructions

To APPEAR more concise - and clearer! - even if there are just as many words 🙂

• use salami technique: chop the source material into shorter chunks
• connect the chunks with logical connectors
• use SVO word order if your target language lends itself to this, and start sentences with the subject
• keep the subject and verb close to each other
• use intonation as a fantastic shortcut!

The speech I chose (in French) is number 32125 in the SCIC Speech Repository, titled L'Hydrogène.

I wanted to give you transcripts here, but they exceed the permitted word count for show notes. However, you can find them on my blog.