An exercise to practise salami technique

You’ve probably heard of ‘salami technique’ (aka ‘chunking’ or ‘segmentation’).

This is a technique used in simultaneous to help the interpreter deal with the cognitive load of dense information and the differences in sentence structure between language pairs. Salami technique can also help you avoid linguistic interference, and it makes the message easier for the audience and relay-takers to digest.

It consists of breaking up long sentences (or rather, ideas) into smaller chunks in the target language, using ‘open syntax’ – by which I mean syntax that gives you many options for what to say next, rather than backing you into a corner. In practice, this means connecting ideas with coordinating conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and their equivalents – ‘however’, ‘thus’, ‘in addition’), rather than connecting ideas with words like ‘despite’, ‘although’, or with relative clauses.

I don’t recall being taught specifically how to use salami technique. I think it was mentioned in passing: ‘break long sentences up into smaller ones’, but no-one broke it down into:

identify ‘units of meaning’
reformulate a unit of meaning into an independent utterance (in grammatical terms, this is usually a clause or sentence)
connect this to the next unit of meaning using coordinating conjunctions, making sure to preserve the logic of the original speech

I don’t want to turn this post into a very lengthy explanation of salami technique, so I’ll just make two important points:

people often worry that if they use salami technique, the output will sound childish. BUT a) you don’t have to use salami technique with every single sentence in the speech. It’s a coping strategy intended to help you deal with particular challenges, so you can use it judiciously. However, if you never practise it, you’ll find it hard to use. and b) salami technique relies on simple syntax (subject-verb-object with a few frills), but you can use technical, formal, or sophisticated vocabulary, and you can express complex ideas even if the grammar is straightforward.
people often imagine salami technique as being all about chopping long sentences into lots of short ones, but in fact, sometimes you don’t make a long sentence shorter at all; you just change the syntax to make it ‘open’, which makes your life as an interpreter much easier.

The first exercise (below) is intended to help you identify units of meaning, i.e. an idea, something that could stand alone as an utterance.

For example, in the sentence “Despite severe delays at Manchester airport this morning, most delegates have made it to today’s meeting.”:

“Despite” is not a unit of meaning.

“Despite severe” is not a unit of meaning.

“Despite severe delays” is not (quite) a unit of meaning – delays with what?

“Despite severe delays at Manchester airport this morning” IS a unit of meaning. You could turn it into “There have been severe delays at Manchester airport this morning”.

If you were ‘chunking’ the sentence, you could say:

“There have been severe delays at Manchester airport this morning, BUT most delegates have made it to today’s meeting.” (inserting BUT to preserve the meaning of ‘despite’).

Beginners tend to either wait too long (i.e. they don’t start their interpretation until they’ve heard the whole sentence, up to ‘today’s meeting’), or they launch into the sentence without knowing where they’re going (perhaps after ‘despite severe delays’). Neither technique is safe; if you systematically wait too long, you end up leaving out information. If you start too soon, you take unnecessary risks (what if an unknown word comes up?).

Exercise 1- text (basic level)

For this exercise, it’s best to have a paper copy of the text you’ll be working with. You can copy/paste it and print it off, download the article and print it, or whatever works for you!

The text is based on an article from The Guardian, but I added the first paragraph. It’s about racism in the UK.

What you need to do is read through the text, putting a forward slash wherever you identify a unit of meaning.

Here’s the first paragraph, but the whole text is in the PDF below.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, today I want to talk about the opinions of Diane Abbott, who is, or was, Britain’s first black Labour MP. In the papers at the weekend, she wrote an article in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK, or Irish travellers, or other ethnic minority groups.

In other words, she was establishing a hierarchy of racism, where ‘my racism is worse than your racism’, and where she was almost minimising the significance of antisemitism, which is very much a sore point for the Labour party in the UK at the moment.

In fact, she actually likened the prejudice, as she called it – not ‘racism’- experienced by Jewish people and Travellers, with the same sort of thing experienced by people who have red hair.”

Here’s my version:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, / today I want to talk about the opinions of Diane Abbott, / who is, / or was, / Britain’s first black Labour MP. / In the papers at the weekend, she wrote an article / in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK / cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK, / or Irish travellers, / or other ethnic minority groups. /

In other words, she was establishing a hierarchy of racism, / where ‘my racism is worse than your racism’, / and where she was almost minimising the significance of antisemitism, / which is very much a sore point for the Labour party in the UK at the moment./

In fact, she actually likened the prejudice, as she called it / – not ‘racism’- / experienced by Jewish people and Travellers, with the same sort of thing experienced by people who have red hair.” /

A few notes:

I’m not sure ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ can be called an idea, but it’s certainly not dependent on anything else, so I’ve classed it as a unit of meaning (a form of address or greeting).
‘who is, or was, Britain’s first black Labour MP’. I’ve put a forward slash between who is / or was / Britains’ first…. Ideally, I would have used two colours, because in reality, ‘who is…Britain’s first black Labour MP’ is one unit of meaning, and ‘or was’ is another (stuck in the middle). In practice, when interpreting, you might choose to chunk the sentence by saying something like ‘Diane Abbott is Britain’s first black Labour MP, or rather…she was.’ By the way, I made a mistake at this point, because she was in fact Britain’s first black woman MP.
There’s a similar example in this passage: ‘cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK’. There are three units here, with one of them split into two by the phrase ‘or is on a different scale’: anti-black racism cannot be compared with the prejudice experienced by Jewish people in the UK. It’s on a different scale. And prejudice is the word chosen by Diane Abbott. You could interpret the three ideas very much as I’ve just listed them; or the end could be something like ‘and Diane Abbott deliberately uses two different words’ (you’ll convey the information more successfully with a bit of emphasis/intonation in the last part.)
‘she wrote an article / in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK’: you’re probably thinking that the second part of this is not a unit of meaning, because we don’t yet know what she says about the racism experienced by black people. However, this part of the sentence could be reformulated as something like ‘In her article, she talks about (or ‘she addresses’) the racism experienced by black people in the UK today’, and then you could continue with the next unit of meaning, for example, ‘and she claims it cannot be compared with….’
You could segment even further. For example, you could argue that ‘in the papers at the weekend’ is a unit of meaning, since you could say ‘some newspapers are published at the weekend. Diane Abbott wrote an article for a newspaper. In her article she says….’. But there comes a point where slicing the salami this thinly makes the output longer and less natural. 🙂

Please note the text below contains the ‘n’ word (in a quote), so please don’t continue reading if you find this offensive.

Salami-technique-practice-text Download

Exercise 2 (intermediate)

We’ll try this with a different section of the text, but you can of course go through the whole text in the same way.

Your task is, again, to go through and identify units of meaning. Then for each unit of meaning, see how you can reformulate it (out loud or in your head) to make an independent utterance (a sentence, or a clause that you connect to the next one as necessary).

Could you tackle the units of meaning in a different order?

*note: you can reformulate from English into English (if English is your A or B language), or from English into your A language.

“To counter her argument that the “prejudice” experienced by Irish, Jewish and Traveller people is not a patch on the “racism” suffered by black people, I cannot improve on the letter from someone whose family left a city in Poland where more than 99% of Jews were exterminated for their race and whose experiences of British antisemitism includes having Nazi insignia brandished in their face. As the anonymous writer says: “To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.””

Here’s one possibility:

“Her argument is that Irish, Jewish people, and Travellers experience prejudice, but this prejudice is far less serious than the racism suffered by black people. The best way to counter this is a letter from someone whose family left Poland. They lived in a city where more than 99% of Jews were killed for their race. The author has experienced British antisemitism. For example they have had Nazi insignia brandished in their face. The anonymous writer says: “To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.””

There are of course other ways of ‘chunking’ this text.

For example, you may notice that I have held ‘to counter [her argument]’ in my working memory until the second sentence. I’ve merged it with ‘I cannot improve on the letter….’.

Instead, you could say: ‘how can we counter this argument? The best response is a letter from….’.

Or: ‘how can we counter this argument? With a letter from….’ (here, we lose the idea of ‘best’).

You may also notice that I haven’t chunked every single unit of meaning. In theory, we could say “They lived in a city. In this city, more than 99% of Jews were killed. They were killed for their race.” Similarly, we could say “The writer is anonymous. The writer says:….” However, this is no more concise than the original, and is rather unnatural. This illustrates the fact that you don’t have to use salami technique 100% of the time, especially if it makes your output unnatural.

If you enjoyed this exercise, you’ll find plenty more where that came from in my programme for English retourists, Rock your Retour.

The website contains hundreds of articles and exercises designed specifically for interpreters with an English B, and you can also join weekly live practice sessions, where I give members feedback on their interpreting into English.

Exercise 1- text (basic level)

Exercise 2 (intermediate)

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