How visualisation can help your consecutive

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Complete Interpreter Podcast. The podcast from me, Sophie Luellen Smith, otherwise known as the Interpreting Coach. For you interpreters out there, some of you are translators probably, but you are more than an interpreting machine or a translation machine, and that is why I've called my podcast the Complete Interpreter because I try and bring you some holistic CPT. I talk all things interpreting skills, marketing one day, language, use of language in your interpreting output, and what else. I'm sure I talk about other things. Oh, stress management, absolutely, mindset to help you improve your interpreting performance. Today's episode, I was going to call how to use visualization to improve your interpreting. But when I thought about what I was actually going to say, it occurred to me that perhaps that wasn't the best title, and you'll see why a little bit later. And by the way, when I talk about visualization, I'm not talking about a relaxation technique. You know, when you lie on a mat and you imagine yourself in a forest and you hear the leaves rustling, or you picture yourself on a Greek beach and you're feeling the soft breeze and smelling the salt in the air, that's not the kind of visualization I mean, although I like it very much, and I found it very useful in my life. I am talking about how visualization can help you in particular, in consecutive. Because if you use visualization, it can help you to remember more information, more vividly. It makes it easier to remember some of the information, and it means that you can take fewer notes. And we all know, or at least I always say, that the less you write, the more you can listen and analyse, and you are then more likely to be faithful to the meaning when you give your rendition of that particular speech. So today I want to talk about three scenarios you might encounter when you're doing a consecutive, when visualising the information can help you write much less, which is a good thing for all the reasons I have mentioned. The first type of scenario I want to give you is when the speaker gives an explanation. In particular, an explanation that contains familiar components, or that's about something that you already know or have an inkling about. If this happens when you're listening to a consecutive speech, there's a very good chance that you can write just a few key words, or maybe you don't even need to write words, you can just do a drawing. I'll give you an example. I have in my repertoire of evergreen speeches, a speech about fruit juice, in particular orange juice, and why it's bad for your teeth, and not necessarily healthy in other ways. And in that speech, I give an explanation about how a study was conducted, which compared the effects of orange juice on a piece of chalk. The chalk was chosen because it mimics your teeth, basically. It has a similar chemical composition. And so there was a comparison between a piece of chalk, the kind of chalk that teachers used to use in the dark ages to write on blackboards dipped into a glass of orange juice versus a piece of chalk dipped into something else, probably Coca-Cola. That's evil as well. Or maybe it was just chalk dipped into a glass of water, and you could see the difference between how eroded the piece of chalk was going to get. If you dipped it in orange juice, now that explanation, if you wrote it out in complete notes with an SVO layout and links and words and abbreviations and all the rest, that might take up quite a lot of space in your note part. But frankly, if you've listened really carefully to the explanation and you've grasped relatively quickly that it's about a comparison, you can just write chalk and then OJ versus water, let's say. Or you could draw a cup with a piece of chalk in it, two cups with a piece of chalk in each one and then label one of them OJ and one of them water. You don't really have to write a lot at all and that's because if you're listening actively and understanding the argument and picturing in your mind what's happening, note the piece of chalk gradually descending into the glass and how it gets eaten away and how you end up with something porous and that's likely to fall apart, then you don't have to write it all because it's there engraved on your memory. That is my first scenario then when you have an explanation, especially of something that's familiar to you. The next possible scenario where visualization could be very helpful is if your speaker is telling a story, a story about themselves perhaps or a story about somebody else and when I say a story that usually has a kind of chronological component. So a sequence of events and they say this happened and then this happened and then this happened. For example, one of the speeches I often give to interpreter students who've just begun to do consecutive is this speech about how I became a millionaire and amusingly over the years several Chinese students have interpreted that as how I became a millionaire which I would love to be true but it's absolutely not true that I'm a millionaire and that is an opportunity for us to talk about various other things like plausibility and deducing information from context etc when there's an unknown word. However, that's a whole other conversation but in that speech I begin the speech by saying some years ago I went to a wedding with my husband at the time he was my boyfriend. It was a wedding in the UK and I wore this lovely navy blue outfit with a beautiful hat, a big hat, it's quite traditional to do that at weddings in the UK with a broad brim and a nice ribbon. After the wedding I was travelling to Brussels for work and I didn't want to carry my hat with me to Brussels in a big hat box and then have to fly home with it so I asked my boyfriend as he was at the time to take the hat back to Leeds with him which he did on the train and when I phoned him that evening to have a chat I said did you get back okay and how is everything and he went I've got some really bad news for you it's about the hat. I was quite panicky at that point I said what happened did you sit on it and he said no I left it on the train and so on and so forth the speech goes on from there but perhaps you can see that that is the kind of story that you can easily retrieve from your memory when you do consecutive without notes why because you can picture it in your mind you can see the sequence of events unfolding perhaps you're seeing this big blue hat you're seeing a person on a train and that visualization means that when you are taking notes again you don't have to write a kind of dictation of a bait in account of everything that happened you can just write a few keywords or again draw a picture of a hat and a train and write lost property or something and all of those things will prompt your memory will jog your memory which is what your notes should do ideally no one says that consecutive notes have to be a full and complete sort of dictation of what you're hearing or what's in your mind if you're interpreting it in your head scenario number three is if the speaker is saying something quite personal so it's not necessarily a story with a sequence of events but personal comments by speakers are often easier to visualize because they're often relatable there's something about their everyday life or their family life or something they did on holiday or something about their children and that makes them easy to visualize I'll give you an example or maybe a couple of examples I was recording a speech today for a consecutive class about Christmas Adverts that supermarkets in the UK pay for and I was saying every year the big supermarkets pay for these big advertising campaigns and they have a Christmas advert and usually that Christmas advert demonstrates values like empathy and caring it tends to be a family or children opening presents there's a sprinkling of magic in there somewhere perhaps you know Father Christmas appears with a sleigh or or there's some kind of golden glitter on the screen so I was describing and that description of something visual literally the images that you see on a TV screen when the ad is running makes it easy to remember you can just write a couple of adjectives or a couple of keywords and hopefully that will bring the whole picture back the other speech I was recording sounded like something a bit drier perhaps and it was about loneliness and I started that speech by talking about the Covid pandemic and how it has exacerbated feelings of loneliness so perhaps there you if you were listening to that speech you would picture yourself at home unable to go out and then I went into some reasons why loneliness is more of a problem than it was in the past and one of the reasons I mentioned was that we no longer tend to live in multi-generational households that now it's quite common for couples or singles to live by themselves as opposed to people living in multi-generational households where perhaps you would live with your parents and even your grandparents in the past so that's an image that you can easily visualize you can have a house in your mind and lots of bedrooms and several generations of the same family as I said at the top of this episode in these sorts of situations if you're listening to a consecutive speech you can save a lot of time on your note-taking and you can listen more carefully you have a better chance of remembering more of the information if you visualize and then note down a key words or a picture rather than trying to scribble everything down I even know of somebody a fellow interpreter who visualises other things when she's interpreting for example when she's doing simultaneous if she hears a figure and she's not able to immediately interpret that figure because of Dick garage because she's a bit further back in the sentence she pictures the number in I think fluorescent lights I think she said on a black background so that number flashes up for her on a black background and then it's easier for her to remember when she gets to the right place in the sentence that is what I wanted to talk about today a fantastically useful technique also I thought until I saw a Twitter post by someone I've never heard of before but it was reposted by a friend of mine and it is about what this author called the Apple Visualisation Scale nothing to do with computers and iMac, iPods, iPhones but about fruit in this Twitter post and you can google it if you like there is a series of silhouettes of a human head so this five of them in profile the kind of silhouette of a human head and inside there is an image of an apple and the heads are labeled one two three four five so head number one has a very detailed image of an apple in there with colour and shading and hue it looks 3D and then head two has an apple that is still apple shaped it's quite detailed but the colour isn't so subtle it doesn't have shades of colour it doesn't have a little touch of green fading into red it's just a kind of flat red colour head number three has a black and white version of this apple head number four has a black and white version which looks kind of too dimensional and flat instead of being that nice round 3D apple and head number five is black there's nothing in there there's no apple at all now this person his name was John Green in case i didn't mention it who posted this on twitter now x was saying oh my goodness are some of you are five on this visualisation scale he said i always thought that when people use the word visualize and talked about visualising things what they actually meant was thinking of words or thinking of ideas or thinking of feelings that are associated with things and he said i hadn't grasped or understood that some people actually have a picture in their mind's eye a really detailed picture for example if it's a picture of an apple that you can look at that apple from different angles you could rotate it in your head you could turn it upside down and he said i just didn't get it i didn't understand that other people had that in their brains because he said i'm a five i have no ability to create visual mental imagery at all i was interested and delighted to discover that this uh what to call it condition it's not a medical condition it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you but this condition the inability to create visual mental imagery has a wonderful name wonderful because it comes from Greek and that is a fantasia which i suppose literally would mean something like lack of imagination but it doesn't mean that you have no imagination it just means that you're inner mental world what what i call a mind's eye isn't actually an eye at all because you cannot create mental imagery now john green said interesting things in relation to this which had never occurred to me uh for example he says he has no sense of direction at all no sense of direction if you asked him to explain the layout of a room for example to say well there's a sofa and perpendicular to the sofa there's a chair and then there's a television against the back wall or whatever he would not be able to do that unless he was in the room to be able to describe it because he can't see the room in his head i'm fascinated by this and it and it's sort of led me to think about lots of other things for example um if he's reading a book a novel he doesn't see the characters in his mind perhaps then unlike me he's never disappointed when he sees a film adaptation of something like the hobbit or harry potter because i've read them and somehow i've imagined the characters a certain way and then you see them on the screen you go no that's wrong that's not snake that's not harry potter maybe people with a fantasia don't have that problem but then that leaves me to think what do their memories look like you can see i'm automatically biased towards the visual i'm going what what do their memories look like but maybe i should be saying what do their memories feel like what are their memories made of huh baffling and how do they remember not just places but faces if you can't reconstruct somebody's face in your mind and by the way that also has an amazing greet name which is prosopagnosia or prosopagnosia and that comes from what in Monterey would be called prosoport which means face and aronosia would mean ignorance not knowing not recognizing so literally it's about not recognizing people's faces and i learned only a few years ago that there are people who who cannot recognize faces and people who have a severe version of this condition might see their sister or their cousin or somebody they work with every day and not recognize that person until for example the person started speaking and they heard their voice um wow mind-blowing stuff somebody suggested somewhere this must have been online that if you have a fantasia you are less affected by scary stories that you read if you read a ghost story or a a crime thriller or something i don't know a horror story you would be less affected by it because you can't visualize it in your mind and so it affects you less anyway absolutely fascinating stuff but of course as soon as i saw this apple visualization scale i thought to myself oh how very ego centric i am and perhaps we all are because i am so guilty of assuming often that other people's brains work the way mind does or it's never occurred to me to question whether other people's minds work the way mind does so i would say that i'm a five on this oh let me get it the right way around a one on this apple visualization scale or perhaps somewhere between a one and a two which means that i find it relatively easy to visualize things not just mental images but sometimes i can also associate sounds or feelings or smells and maybe that's why i have found visualization extremely useful as a relaxation technique or also when i was pregnant with my new two children i used a lot of visualization techniques and i did that during childbirth and afterwards i went off preaching to the unconverted and and talking to all my friends who were pregnant and saying oh you should try this hypnobirthing stuff it's absolutely amazing it's incredible and maybe that was not such a good idea if they were a five on the apple visualization scale and therefore when they tried to visualize happy places and beaches and ribbons and whatever else was going on in my mind when i was giving birth maybe they were drawing a blank and seeing nothing and it was totally unhelpful so all my wonderful exhortations to interpreting students to visualize and write less and so on and so forth perhaps only work if you are a one or a two or a three on this apple visualization scale and work much less well if you're the kind of person who doesn't have a lot of mental visual imagery who doesn't have much of a mind's eye and if that's you maybe you're better off with other memory techniques to help you with your consecutive I would love to hear from any of you who have a fantasia or conversely who are a number one or even a zero on the apple visualization scale and you can visualize all kinds of things in incredible detail and you use that as an active listening technique to fill in lots of information when you're doing consecutive or maybe even simultaneous I don't know if you've listened to the podcast episode about echoic memory and how certain people including me can sort of rewind what they've heard let's say in simultaneous they've missed a bit because they've had to reorganize the information because it was in German for example or in Turkish let's not single out German and so if I have missed something I was rejigging my sentence I can often just go back and kind of press rewind and replay in my mind what the speaker said a few seconds ago and it wasn't until I was recording that episode and thinking about it that I realized not everybody does that and not everybody can do it but maybe if you have a fantasia you have a good echoic memory and vice versa I don't know write to me on info at theinterpretingcoach.com I would love to hear how you use visualization when you're interpreting or whether you do not use visualization because you can't because you're a fantastic fantastic fantastic anyway I hope you've enjoyed this episode in the show notes you will find a short form where you can tell me what you'd like me to talk about next hope to see you then bye