The worst mistakes made by interpreter trainers

Hello and welcome to this episode of the complete interpreter podcast by me Sophie Luellen Smith, sometimes known as the interpreting coach. Why the complete interpreter? Because you are more than just an interpreting or translation machine. There is more to you than that work just in the booth. So in this podcast, I sometimes talk about mindset. I sometimes talk about target language, and I generally fail to talk about marketing. Most of the time I talk about interpreting skills, and that's what I'm going to do today. Although this podcast is a little bit different from most of the ones that I record, because it is addressed to trainers, really, rather than interpreting students or practising interpreters. In a clickbait kind of way, I have entitled this podcast episode, "The Four worst mistakes made by interpreter trainers." We'll see if you agree with these ideas. I'll be interested to hear from you as usual. And by the way, I'm going to preface this podcast by saying, "I am guilty of committing all of these errors. At some point or other, I've done all of them. Sometimes there were reasons for that. And I would say the biggest reason is that in my teaching at university in the UK, which has been mainly at the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester, there were significant time pressures. Some of you may know that in the UK, the masters in interpreting studies is one year. In fact, in general, masters courses last one year, not two. So whereas on the continent, sometimes, interpreting students spend a whole year learning consecutive, and then they move on to simultaneous in year two, in the UK, you have to squeeze consecutive without notes, consecutive with notes and simultaneous into two semesters, lasting 11 weeks each. It's a miracle that anybody comes out of that with any kind of solid interpreting skills at all, and they do. They do sometimes. In short, sometimes I did not implement these principles through lack of time, because there I was with a group of students. I wanted to make sure that I listened to each student at least once during the class. But, well, may I cool-pa? I wish I had had more time, or I wish I did more of these things, and also some of them take practice and experience. But instead of waffling on about these things without telling you what they are, I will get straight down to business and talk about my first error that interpreters make. This error is about showing versus telling. If any of you like writing, for example, creative writing, writing fiction, or short stories, or anything like that, I'm quite sure you will have encountered the concept that is usually better for an author to show rather than to tell. The advice is, show don't tell. So, for example, instead of devoting many sentences to a character's internal monologue, or saying that a character is shy and lacking in confidence, and that is why she behaves in a certain way, or he. Instead, you show that by the character's actions or by a piece of dialogue rather than internal monologue, or instead of letting the narrator tell the reader what's going on. This, I think, is an important principle in interpreter training as well. When it comes to demonstrating the skills that you are hoping students will acquire, just think about pretty much any other skill that you have tried to acquire in your life. Have you ever been to cooking classes, or did you learn an instrument as a child, for example, the piano, or have you been to salsa dancing lessons, or learnt to sail, or anything like that? I have done some of these things, and on the whole you will find that the instructor or teacher gives you a demonstration of some kind. For example, I can remember going to a cake decorating workshop, and the instructor had made a cake, and she was showing us how to ice it, and how to make little cake toppers made of icing, so that we could see, not just the tools that she was using, but also the speed with which she was doing it, and how much icing she was putting on her palette knife, etc. Similarly, I used to take piano lessons as a child, and when we moved on to a new piece, my piano teacher would always play the piece for me, so that I could hear what it was meant to sound like. As opposed to her going, sit down at the piano, start sight reading, and it will get better as you go along, and I'll just give you a few tips. It's nice to have something to aim for. It allows you to picture what you are supposed to do. And, curiously, this does not always happen on interpreting courses. I can remember my own interpreter training. I did the in-house training scheme at the European Commission, which was called the "stash" at the time, and I do not remember our trainers demonstrating consecutive for us. I have no memory of that. Therefore, even if they did demonstrate it, it must have been a one-off because I have forgotten. We certainly did not have regular demos from our trainers, and I'm not sure they demonstrated simultaneous either. On the other hand, in the last two months of my training course, "stash", we did some dummy booth, and with our mentors, who were called "paren" and "paren", "maren", we would go into the booth in real meetings, and we would have an opportunity, not just to interpret, but also to tune into the other booths, and listen to what the other booths sound like. That was absolutely eye-opening, and I think that is really important for interpreting students. So as I said, when I started consecutive, I didn't really know what I was aiming for, which is rather strange, trying to teach somebody a skill when they do not know what the standard is that they're trying to reach. I'll give you another example. I remember years ago, I had a group of Greek students, and we were interpreting a French speech, and one of the students asked me to go into the booth, I think, and interpret it with her. So we went into the booth, and I interpreted not from French into Greek, I hastened to add. I would never do that in a million years, but I did the speech from French into English. And I think that was the first time that the penny dropped for her about how much freedom you can have when you're working in simultaneous. Because I think when, and this is a generalisation, when students begin simultaneous, they are trying to translate. They're trying to follow what they hear in the original, mostly in the same order, mostly expressed in the same way. I'm not saying you should never do that in simultaneous, but the idea that you can shift bits of the sentence around, that you can express things differently, but with the same meaning, was quite abstract to them until they actually heard, or in the case of this student, until she heard me interpret this one speech. And I could see the sort of, oh, the light bulb moment as the penny dropped. It can backfire as well, trying to do demonstrations for the students can backfire. And the classic occasion when it backfired really badly on me, was probably, I think it was the second year that I was a trainer at the University of Leeds. And I had a big group that year. And I was doing the very first introduction to simultaneous. I thought to myself, I'll do something a bit different. This is when I was young and keen and had some ideas. So I thought, OK, I'll do something a bit different. And instead of talking to them about booth etiquette and microphone discipline and whatever, I will go into the booth and I will interpret and I'll do it badly and I'll make, make all the mistakes and do all the things that you shouldn't do in the booth. So I'll talk to you close to the microphone. I will tap a pen on the on the table so it's really noisy. And I'll have somebody in there with me and I'll turn around and whisper to that person and say, did you understand that bit? Et cetera, I came up with various other things that I could do. So I enlisted an accomplice and I said to the students, OK, I'm going to go and interpret now. You just listen and we'll talk about it afterwards. Off I went to the booth and I played my role and did all these awful things that you should never do. And then went back into the room and I said to the students, what were your impressions? What did you notice from that? And I thought they would say things like, oh, you were making too much noise with your pen or wow, you left massive gaps. It was really annoying or whatever else I was doing. You were shouting into the microphone or you were breathing heavily. I can't remember what I did. But they said none of these things. They made really vague weird comments. They had hardly anything to say. So I was trying to elicit more comments from them and and prod them into saying something with enormous difficulty. And eventually I thought, this clearly isn't working. What the hell is going on? So I revealed my ruse and I said, well, I did all these things in the booth that are really annoying. Don't you think? At that point, one of the students said, oh, we just thought you were a crap interpreter. Oh, well that crashed my selfist team. We just thought you were a crap interpreter. There you go. That's how much confidence they had in me as their trainer. So I concluded from that that kind of roleplay was not a good way to introduce the concepts of booth etiquette or microphone discipline or whatever. Or if you're going to do it that way, you're probably better off using the skit video that was made a while ago. Called, I can't remember what it's called, something with booth in the name. But in essence, it's better to watch a video where other people are making fools of themselves. And perhaps with that distance, the students are better able to realize that it's a deliberate ploy or it was made more obvious. Then to actually do it yourself as their trainer in whom they're supposed to trust and believe. So there are many ways that you can show rather than tell. One of the important ones, one of the obvious ones is that when you're teaching consecutive note-taking, it's really great to put some notes up on the board. You can do it yourself as a trainer and give some ideas, but you can also get several students to come up and write on the board and then you can discuss the symbols they've used or they lay out on the page to see what worked and what didn't. Or you can, they put their notes on the page and then you cross bits out or draw an arrow to show how you could have altered those notes to make them more successful. You can also use demos that you find elsewhere if you personally don't want to expose yourself, shall we say, by doing a real consecutive in front of your class. You could, for example, use the Skick Knowledge Centre on interpreting and translation. Just go to Skick Train and there are several demos there where you can watch professional interpreters taking notes and then interpreting. And then there's a debrief. That is very useful. For simultaneous, why not listen to professional interpreters? And you can find recordings, if, for example, you're aiming for an EU type standard, then you can find recordings on the Commission's Audio Visual Service or on European Parliament TV. Or if you're aiming for a UN standard, you can find plenty of material online to listen to real interpreters. And after all, for those of us who are trainers and started out a while ago, I'm sure you like me when you started out, listened very intently to what your colleagues were saying in the booth. I used to pick up useful phrases. And also just listen to how they manage difficult passages, particularly between German and English, my bug pair, in technique terms. So those are some things that you can do. And there are others. You could, for example, decide that when you're introducing consecutive note-taking, you could do that as a show rather than a tell. And instead of saying to them, well, if you take notes, it can help you do this. But if you take notes, it could also mean that you don't make enough eye contact or whatever. You could do that as a demonstration, for example, by splitting your class into two groups. And this is an approach that you will find described in Seton and Doron's book about interpreter training. You can split the class into two groups. You get one of the groups to take notes from a relatively fast, dense speech. This is before they have learned note-taking you understand. And you get the other group to just listen and effectively do a consecutive without notes. And then you listen as a class. You listen to one of each of those performances. And chances are that the students who have had no training and note-taking, who are confronted with something relatively fast and dense, will focus probably on the micro-level and on trying to get some facts or numbers down. But may not produce something that sounds smooth, that has good eye contact, that is well expressed, etc, etc. They may lose sight of the big picture. So on the whole, you will find that people prefer the version from the students who are doing consecutive without notes, even though there may be some details missing. However, anything is a teachable opportunity. So if it goes the other way, and if some of the students who took notes, even without training, did a fantastic job, then you can say, "Oh, look, when you're taking notes, you can be very accurate, you can get lots of details, you can get all the names and figures, etc." You can turn pretty much anything into a teachable moment. In fact, if you do a consecutive in class and it goes a bit wrong, that can also be an opportunity to laugh with the students or to explain to them why it went wrong, what you should have done differently. I don't think there's anything wrong with making yourself a little bit vulnerable like that. And I will come back to that later when I talk about the fourth worst mistake that trainers make. Right, mistake number two. This is about giving feedback to students. A big mistake, let's call it that, is if the trainer sticks to saying what went wrong and gives a sort of shopping list of all the things that the student missed or phrased badly and never goes beyond that to trying to diagnose why that happened and above all to try and offer remedies. For example, useful exercises to practice that particular skill. This is really difficult. You need experience as a trainer to be able to move on from the what to the why and then the how. And sometimes you're managed part of that, sometimes you may be able to diagnose or you may end up asking the student questions and saying, "Well, do you think it's because this was your decalage too long and you can try and work out together what happened?" Sometimes you may not be able to work out what happened. That way of giving feedback, I think, of finding the problem areas, particularly if they're recurrent problems or bigger issues of technique and then moving on from that to trying to work out why they happened and then what can be done to address them is so important to interpreting students development because if they come to class and the feedback is just, "Okay, overall the speech was pretty good. You made eye contact but you missed this out. You missed this out. You missed this out." Then what, where do they go from there in thinking about how they can improve next time? So if you're a trainer and you're not in the habit of trying to group the types of errors that you hear, for example, and then work out the why of those errors and then offer suggested exercises, I would give you two suggestions. Number one is, think about it in advance. So maybe brainstorm a list of the typical problems that you see in students when you have just introduced consecutive note-taking, let's say. So you write down on your list things like the student doesn't make eye contact anymore or the student is missing out all the links between ideas or there's too much, I don't know, language interference. And then you're going to create a kind of table. So for all these issues, try and work out what could be the cause of that issue. I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a student who is making hardly any eye contact anymore. What could that be due to? Could it be because they are making up ad hoc symbols as they go along and then when they get to that place in their notes, they just, they just don't recognise the symbol and they don't know what it refers to. So they're spending too long deciphering their own notes. Or could it be that they're writing too much. So they have to look down because they're essentially reading their notes instead of just glancing at them. Or could it be that they're taking their notes in the source language instead of the target language. And so at the point of delivery, they have to do a kind of site translation of what they've written on their notepads so they're looking down too much. Or could it just be a bad habit that developed when they started note-taking and nobody ever said to them, for example, okay, what you're going to do from now on is you can glance at your notes but you are only allowed to open your mouth when you look up and be a little bit brutal for a speech or two until they get into that groove. So pre-preparing a kind of troubleshooting grid is something that you can do both for consecutive and for simultaneous. And something else you can do, if you're pretty good at diagnosing but you can't think of other exercises to do other than just interpreting, then do get a hold of Andy Gillis's book, The Students Practice Book which contains a lot of suggestions for exercises that you can do to work on lots of different subskills. Error number three, this is still about feedback, it follows on from my last point and it is about the length of the feedback that you give to students. Now clearly this will depend on many factors. If you're a trainer at a university, maybe you have 20 people in your classroom or maybe you only have four, clearly that will make a difference. Maybe that means you can't listen to every student every time or it means that you have to make the feedback shorter or what have you. But all of the things being equal, I would say that if the feedback is very long, too long, there are a number of disadvantages to that. One is that the person who's listening to you, the student who has just interpreted may just stop absorbing what you're saying. There's just too much and they can't listen anymore. And or that they can't prioritise in all the things that you're saying, they can't distinguish between what is very important and what is actually not that bad at their stage of development. And it's partly up to you as the trainer to make that clear. For example to say things like overall, I think that your performance XYZ and then you go through some specific points and then maybe you wrap up by saying. So overall you got the message across, what you need to work on next is XYZ and you could consider maybe doing some site translation to help you with that. Or something along those lines. The other disadvantage of really long feedback if you go into a lot of detail is that almost inevitably, even if you actually thought the speech was quite well interpreted, the student will interpret that as just being bad, negative. So if you're going to lots of tiny little details, especially when you're talking to a rhetorist, when sometimes there are lots of little mistakes, for example articles that they missed out or prepositions that were wrong. If you go through all of them or lots of them, then it sounds like loads of things were wrong. And that can obscure the fact that actually the message was very clear, for example, or that it was very engaging and communicative. And a final disadvantage of the shopping list approach to feedback is that the other students in the class can just switch off. They glaze over because, especially if it's very detailed, I just think, "Well, this doesn't apply to me, this is not relevant." So how long should your feedback be? That's a bit like how long should Ticolage be? I don't think there is a golden ratio, a perfect number here. In my experience, and based on my classrooms, I would say that I aim for five minutes, which I think is difficult to do, and takes a lot of experience, and only works if you are grouping your feedback into categories of error or issue. Often my feedback is longer than that, and I would say it's, that's particularly the case if there are some aspects of the feedback that I think are relevant to the whole of the class. For example, if it's a French interpreting class and everybody has a French C, then there may be points of vocabulary or bits in the speech that you want to go over with the whole class if they were particularly difficult. There may be things that you want to ask the speaker to repeat, for example. Or if you're doing a consecutive class, you might want to have a discussion of symbols for a particular passage of the speech, or how you could have written down an abstract part of the speech. And there are ways that you can get the rest of the class involved so they don't completely lose focus. For example, you can ask them questions or you can, you can make a different student go up to the board and write their notes on the board. Or let's say you want to redo a difficult part of the speech, you could ask a different student to reinterpret a particular paragraph. So that is one situation where my feedback I think would definitely be longer than five minutes. And it also, I think, depends on the level that you are working at. If you're working with beginners, there's no point giving hugely long and detailed feedback because generally speaking, there'll be quite big issues of technique to address, and you need to focus on those big issues rather than getting lost in trivia. It's also the case, I think, that I give much longer feedback when I am working with qualified interpreters who are practicing their retour, for example, because their technique is generally speaking quite solid. And so the things that are going to either hamper comprehension or mean that their output is less good than they would like are usually the linguistic issues. For sure, sometimes I will comment on intonation or decalagia or something like that or often language interference. But I allow myself to spend a lot more time on language issues and more detailed issues because these are people who are aiming, for example, for a high-level exam, like a UN exam or an EU exam where the bar is extremely high and they want to know where all their mistakes are coming from. And as I said, the technique issues are out of the way, so I can afford to spend more time talking about language. But I will always try and group that into categories. For example, if I'm giving feedback to somebody who's working on an English B, then I will talk about issues of syntax, collocations, articles, prepositions, register, etc, rather than going through chronologically and going, oh, you said this wrong, or you said that wrong. And just to wrap up this point about feedback and feedback being too long, if you're working with beginners, students at university, it's really good to have an objective for them in each lesson, especially at the beginning. If they're just starting with consecutive without notes, the objective might just be finish all your sentences and make some eye contact. Or when they're starting to take notes, it might be something similar. It might be be coherent, communicate with the audience. And later on, it might be make sure you get all the links, make sure you are putting in the secondary information as well as the main points. It depends where you are in the pedagogical arc of that academic year and it also depends on individual students. But my point here is, if you've given them an objective, then really you should be giving them feedback on that objective. And sometimes I get students or coaching clients to tell me what they want to work on and they will say, "I am just trying to sound logically coherent and finish all my sentences." Or they will say, "I want to make sure that I'm linking the ideas." And I would try to give them feedback on that. I don't always manage to only give them feedback on that. And actually I don't always think it's appropriate to only give feedback on that. If that were the case, then we'd be in a classroom where I would say to students, "Right, your only goal is to finish all your sentences." And then my feedback would be, "You finished all your sentences well done, next person." Then I feel like I'm not giving them any advice for what comes next. So I might only do that in the very first session when they do simultaneous. Usually I try and give them the feedback first on their objectives. And then sometimes I will phrase it as, "Next, we need to work on X." Or, "And to reach the next level with your simultaneous, we need to look at Y." Because I still think it's important for them to know, to have an awareness of what isn't working brilliantly. Even if they have ticked off one of their objectives on the checklist as it were. Okay, "My last error made by trainers." Maybe nowadays there are fewer trainers who do this than in the past. Certainly in the past it depended on where you got your training. Certain institutions that I shall not name in France were well known for crushing students spirit, breaking them down and then not bothering to rebuild them. And I'm sure that that has changed. It's certainly not like that in the UK, which is perhaps too touchy-feely, too indulgent when students have difficulties. But anyway, the point I am getting at is, "Don't make every lesson a test for your students." I think it's a mistake for students to feel that every class that they go to is an opportunity to fail and to feel bad. Especially if, like us in the UK, you only have one year to learn these skills. It's okay to not be brilliant at them straight away. It's okay to be a beginner. And so I try to bring some principles of growth mindset into the classroom. And if you haven't heard of growth mindset, then go and look up Carol Dweck and her work on that. Because actually, feeling like you're always exposed, you're always under pressure, you're being told that you're bad and you constantly feel that you're failing and you're not good enough, is not conducive to learning. It doesn't make it fun. It means probably the trainer will get bad feedback at the end of the year. But also, it doesn't help learning to be in that state. Because then you'll have students who have a lot of adrenaline going on, a lot of fight or flight. And it makes it harder for them to concentrate. Now, what I've just said has to be balanced a little bit by the fact that if you make your classroom super supportive and lovely and it becomes a comfort zone, that is not always good practice for exam season. Because it's become so comfortable in the classroom and the students are so used to each other's style of feedback and so okay with your feedback that there's no adrenaline. Both extremes, I think, are less than ideal. So if you find that your classroom is really a comfort zone for the students, make sure you change things up occasionally. Bring in someone new, a new speaker or someone who can listen to the students who hasn't heard them before or arrange, I don't know, a virtual class with the European Parliament or something so that there's that little bit of pressure. But in general, please don't make your classroom feel like every time the students stand up to interpret it is a test that they either pass or fail and they're either good or bad. As I said, much more on that in Carol Dweck if you want to look up growth mindset principles, I have a free growth mindset challenge on my website, which is at theinterpretingcoach.com. All you need to do is scroll down the homepage and there's a free growth mindset challenge where you will receive an email every day for a week with a particular exercise that you can do and more explanations about growth mindset principles. But sometimes I actually think it's worth doing some things as a collaboration with the students or framing some activities as a collaboration with the students. And obviously this depends on your teaching style, but I'm not a very top-down person, I don't want to be there presenting myself as the authority who knows everything because that's definitely not the case and I don't have all the answers and sometimes it's really nice to present certain things as a collaboration, for example. I think simultaneous with text is one of those things where different things work for different people. Some people will want to look at the text and basically do a site translation and not really listen much to what the speaker is saying. Other people will throw the text away as soon as the speaker starts because it's distracting them from listening. Some people will - I don't know what - glance at it occasionally to make sure that they are on track. In short, people have different reactions to simultaneous with text and personally I don't feel that I have all those answers precisely because it's something that varies so much from individual to individual. So that's where perhaps if I were doing a session on simultaneous with text, I would do it as something really experimental and bring several exercises and just say to the students, you try what you like, you do this, you do that and then will analyse what happened. You can tell us whether you were site translating or reading or just glancing at the text or not using it at all and then you can try and work out what's going to be helpful to you. So that kind of collaboration I think can be really fruitful and nice in the classroom and again, as I was saying when I was talking about giving demos, I don't think there's anything wrong with making yourself vulnerable in invertechomas here and there or maybe a better way of phrasing it is to say being human and showing that you are not perfect because sometimes I feel that the students are in class and they're hearing all the time about, well, you should have got this, you should have got this, you could use this symbol, you can do that, you can do that and then in the end they think they have to be 100% perfect and demonstrating to them that you don't have to be perfect, what you have to do is develop coping strategies for difficult moments and then giving them an opportunity to listen to real interpreters and to how those interpreters are putting those coping strategies into practice, I think is a much more realistic approach instead of trainers purporting to be the authority. After all, no one can teach a person everything they need to know, I think there needs to be multiple sources, different styles of feedback, different styles of teaching and I guess my goal as an interpreter trainer is to try to make students into independent learners, I've got two semesters to do that but I'm thinking ahead and thinking when they're out there in the marketplace nobody will hold their hand, nobody is going to give them detailed feedback on their performance or tell them how they can improve so I want to help them become independent learners and I think the suggestions I've made in this podcast should help you to do that if you are a trainer. That's it on these four errors made by interpreter trainers but of course there are many ways to teach, different trainers will have different individual styles and there's more than one way to skin a cat but I tried to talk about some big principles that are important to me. Love to hear your thoughts, the email as ever is info at theinterpretingcoach.com. I would appreciate it if you'd like to support the show, you can find a link in the show notes and there's also a link there to a form where you can tell me what you would like me to talk about. Next.