Sophie Llewellyn Smith is a conference interpreter with 15 years' experience of interpreter training. On her site theinterpretingcoach.com, you will find eBooks and eCourses to help you consolidate or update your interpreting skills in areas such as note-taking, research skills, analytical skills, and retour interpreting (working into a B language). Each course breaks the skills down into manageable sections and uses a mixture of text, audio and video to examine underlying principles and work on practical exercises. In this way, you can use self-study at your own pace to target your weaknesses, improve your performance and become more marketable.
I’ve spent twenty years helping interpreters improve their retour (at least I hope my techniques are helpful! 😉), but I’ll let you into a little secret: I’ve hardly used my own (French) retour in ten years.
When I was last in Brussels on a temporary contract with the European Commission, I added a French consecutive retour. I was assigned to a handful of high level meetings, usually involving Ministers and Commissioners, before turning freelance and going back to the UK. I stopped working into French with the exception of a mission in Manchester (about young people and contraception!) three years ago.
Reactivating my retour has been on my to-do list for a long time, but there’s always something else that’s a higher priority, and I’m much more valuable to the European institutions as an English booth interpreter with Greek and German in my combination, than as an English booth interpreter with a French retour – after all, they have a whole booth full of French A interpreters with English in their combination!
It seems the time has finally come for me to dust off my French, though, and I’ve spent the past month working hard on it.
I’ve done all the things you would expect: listening to French podcasts, shadowing, reading blog posts and articles, noting down vocabulary, interpreting practice speeches, etc. etc. [If you want to hear more about reactivating your retour, you can listen to my podcast on the subject.]
Times have changed since I last worked so intensively on my French (I think it was 2014), and I wanted to share a couple of fun activities I’ve been playing with. They didn’t exist back in the day, because the technology wasn’t there.
You may, of course, have discovered these tricks already, especially if you’re tech-savvy. 😉
1. Sight translation – with a secret weapon
I often suggest sight translation as an exercise to help with retour training. It’s an opportunity to come up with one or multiple ways of rendering a text in your A language, and it affords you more thinking time than interpreting a speech. [By the way, I do think the word ‘sight translation’ is a misnomer, and it should be called ‘sight interpretation’ to avoid giving the impression we’re looking for some sort of ‘perfect’ version.]
If you’re a retourist, perhaps you’ve had practice sessions where you pick a text, sight interpret into your B language, record yourself, listen back, try to identify awkward passages, and then try to come up with better solutions. This is not always easy to do, and we all sometimes wish we had a tame native speaker to hand to give us suggestions (there are ways to improve your chances of success even if you don’t have a native speaker helping; I explore these in this blog post).
Now you can – at least partially – compensate for the lack of a practice partner, trainer, or coach, by using the fruit of machine translation.
Don’t get me wrong, we all know Google Translate, Linguee et al aren’t perfect, and depending on the corpus they’ve been trained on, the results sometimes have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but they can produce useful results.
Method
Here’s my new and improved version of sight translation.
Choose a text in your A language.
Read through the first paragraph.
Switch on your recording device, and sight interpret this paragraph into your B language, aiming for a smooth and confident delivery.
Copy paste paragraph 1 into e.g. Google Translate or DeepL.
Review the output. Are there any useful terms or phrases that you can steal?
Have a second attempt at sight interpreting this paragraph.
Rinse and repeat with paras 2, 3, etc.
Caveats
There are three obvious caveats:
Make sure the material isn’t confidential.
The quality of the output depends on the topic, because machine translation tools are dependent on a certain corpus of text. Some topics yield better quality results than others; for example, I recently worked on cattle farming and whisky distilling. One of these yielded markedly better results in Google Translate than the other.
If your B language is fairly weak, you will find it difficult to discern whether the output in Google Translate or DeepL is overly literal, unnatural, or simply incorrect. This technique works best if your B language is already strong, i.e. if you can’t always come up with inspired solutions yourself, but you can recognise them when you see them.
Read on for a few examples of French>English and English>French translations. You can skip to the section about flashcards if you don’t have these languages in your combination.
Example 1: Speech in French by Bruno Le Maire (France’s Minister of Economics)
This extract is taken from a speech about France’s financing of climate change measures in developing countries.
“Ces excellents chiffres démontrent l’engagement et la constance de la France en matière d’aide à la lutte contre le changement climatique. Dans le même temps, ils montrent aussi que la finance climat ne peut s’appuyer sur les seuls financements publics pour changer la donne, y compris ceux de la France qui compte parmi les principaux contributeurs à la finance climat dans le monde. Il nous faut passer à l’échelle supérieure et, au-delà de la cible des 100 milliards de dollars, mobiliser les financements de toutes sources et en particulier entraîner davantage de financements privés au service des stratégies climatiques des pays en développement. À cet égard la feuille de route issue du Sommet de Paris pour un nouveau pacte financier mondial doit nous permettre d’améliorer collectivement notre efficacité et notre impact.”
This passage contains a few challenges for retourists (although you may have encountered these expressions many times before, depending on the type of interpreting you do). I have highlighted in bold some of the phrases that you might have to give a little thought to.
Here’s what Google Translate offers:
“These excellent figures demonstrate France’s commitment and consistency in helping to combat climate change. At the same time, they also show that climate finance cannot rely on public financing alone to change the situation, including that of France, which is among the main contributors to climate finance in the world. We need to scale up and, beyond the $100 billion target, mobilize funding from all sources and in particular attract more private funding to serve the climate strategies of developing countries. In this regard, the roadmap resulting from the Paris Summit for a new global financial pact should allow us to collectively improve our efficiency and impact.”
There are some useful options here, including “commitment” (“engagement” can be a little tricky, and 90% of the time is best rendered by something other than engagement in English), “scale up”, “attract funding”, and “roadmap”.
“Changer la donne” has been translated by “change the situation”, which is quite a plain version, but gives the idea clearly.
The Google Translate version also demonstrates one of the pitfalls of this method, which is that the English translation has changed the meaning of the French, or is at the very least ambiguous. The French reads “la finance climat ne peut s’appuyer sur les seuls financements publics pour changer la donne, y compris ceux de la France qui compte parmi les principaux contributeurs à la finance climat dans le monde”; but the English makes it sound as if we’re talking about changing France’s situation: “climate finance cannot rely on public financing alone to change the situation, including that of France”.
Make sure you read the output carefully to check the meaning. If you’re having a second attempt at sight translating the passage, don’t copy anything that’s plain wrong or badly expressed! I find the translated version is often too literal or sticks too closely to the input language’s sentence structure, i.e. by all means pick up useful terminology, but don’t expect the output to give you ideal solutions for sentence structure.
One more possible problem to point out: the translation renders “efficace” as efficient. Alas, “efficace” in French means both efficient and effective. The choice of term depends on the meaning. Personally, I think the meaning here is “effective”.
Let’s compare this with the DeepL version:
“These excellent figures demonstrate France’s commitment and steadfastness in helping to combat climate change. At the same time, they also show that climate finance cannot rely on public funding alone to make a difference, including from France, one of the world’s leading contributors to climate finance. We need to move up a gear and, beyond the $100 billion target, mobilize financing from all sources, and in particular attract more private financing to support developing countries’ climate strategies. In this respect, the roadmap that emerged from the Paris Summit for a new global financial pact should enable us to collectively improve our effectiveness and impact.
Here we have a few more options: “steadfastness”; “make a difference” (for “changer la donne”), “move up a gear”.
Example 2: short passage about whisky in French
“Si cette production en quantités limitées peut être un frein au développement du whisky français, notamment à l’export, elle a tout de même un avantage, celui de répondre à la tendance actuelle du « craft ». D’autant que les producteurs français ont tendance à privilégier les circuits courts et à miser sur la transparence et la traçabilité.”
Let’s say you want to sight translate this from French into English. It may take you a moment to think of good solutions for “un frein au développement” (maybe the first thing that springs to mind is “a brake”, but that doesn’t sound right), “répondre à la tendance actuelle”, “privilégier les circuits courts”, and “miser sur la transparence”.
The risk if you’re working from French into English is that you will stick too closely to the French (i.e. copy the word “privilege” for instance). The result will be over-literal and sound unnatural.
Let’s take a look at what Google Translate gives us for this paragraph.
“If this production in limited quantities can be a hindrance to the development of French whisky, particularly for export, it still has an advantage, that of responding to the current “craft” trend. Especially since French producers tend to favor short circuits and focus on transparency and traceability.”
Now we need to assess the output.
I rather like “be a hindrance” for “un frein au développement”. You could take things a step further by looking it up on Linguee, for instance, where you would find alternatives such as “an impediment” or “an obstacle”.
“Favor” is a good solution for “privilégier” (we obviously want to avoid saying “they privilege short circuits”), and “focus on” works pretty well for “miser sur” (the literal meaning is “bank on” or “rely on”, but these are not so successful).
On the other hand, I’m not so keen on “short circuits”, which I don’t think is the most commonly used expression in English, and clauses beginning with “si” always ring alarm bells, since they’re not always true conditionals in French. If I were interpreting this into English, I would not begin with “if this production…can be a hindrance”.
Let’s take a look at DeepL:
“While this limited-quantity production may hinder the development of French whisky, particularly for export, it does have one advantage: it responds to the current “craft” trend. All the more so as French producers tend to favor short distribution channels and focus on transparency and traceability.”
This version has fixed the “if” problem, and offers us “short distribution channels”, which I think is clearer in English than “short circuits”. To be honest, I often go for something that emphasises local production or direct sales, since that reflects the idea in French.
Example 3: Wagyu beef, English>French
A seemingly random topic – I’m sure you will have guessed I was preparing for an assignment.
This is the paragraph I put through Google Translate.
“We also have a small but wonderful fold of Highland cattle. Our mission is to produce the best beef in the world from our 25,000-acre estate, set within the majestic highland landscape of Perthshire, Scotland which offers rich, fertile grasslands on which all our herds graze.
Established by husband and wife team Mohsin Altajir and Martine Chapman in 2011, our ethos of quality, respect and precision underpins everything we do. What should have been a hobby turned into a full blown business overnight. Mohsin was playing golf six days a week and Martine was looking for something to sink her teeth into.
They had never set foot on a farm before or been up close and personal with cattle. It was their passion for great quality produce and their love of animals that saw them move to the Highlands of Scotland and so Highland Wagyu was born.”
If you’re not Scottish, you may not know what a “fold” of cattle is. There are also a few idiomatic expressions in this text that might give you pause if you’re working into a B language.
Here is Google Translate’s version:
“Nous avons également un petit mais merveilleux élevage de bovins Highland. Notre mission est de produire le meilleur bœuf au monde à partir de notre domaine de 25 000 acres, situé dans le majestueux paysage des hautes terres du Perthshire, en Écosse, qui offre des prairies riches et fertiles sur lesquelles paissent tous nos troupeaux. Créée par l’équipe mari et femme Mohsin Altajir et Martine Chapman en 2011, notre philosophie de qualité, de respect et de précision sous-tend tout ce que nous faisons. Ce qui aurait dû être un passe-temps s’est transformé du jour au lendemain en une véritable entreprise. Mohsin jouait au golf six jours par semaine et Martine cherchait de quoi se mettre à pleines dents. Ils n’avaient jamais mis les pieds dans une ferme auparavant ni été en contact étroit avec du bétail. C’est leur passion pour les produits de grande qualité et leur amour des animaux qui les ont amenés à s’installer dans les Highlands d’Écosse et c’est ainsi qu’est né Highland Wagyu.
And DeepL’s:
“Nous possédons également un petit mais merveilleux troupeau de bovins des Highlands. Notre mission est de produire le meilleur bœuf du monde à partir de notre domaine de 25 000 acres, situé dans le majestueux paysage des Highlands du Perthshire, en Écosse, qui offre des prairies riches et fertiles sur lesquelles paissent tous nos troupeaux.
Fondée en 2011 par Mohsin Altajir et Martine Chapman, une équipe composée d’un mari et d’une femme, notre éthique de la qualité, du respect et de la précision est à la base de tout ce que nous faisons. Ce qui aurait dû être un hobby s’est transformé en une véritable entreprise du jour au lendemain. Mohsin jouait au golf six jours par semaine et Martine cherchait quelque chose à se mettre sous la dent.
Ils n’avaient jamais mis les pieds dans une ferme auparavant et n’avaient jamais côtoyé de près le bétail. C’est leur passion pour les produits de grande qualité et leur amour des animaux qui les ont amenés à s’installer dans les Highlands, en Écosse, et c’est ainsi qu’est né Highland Wagyu.”
Let’s go through the two translations and see what we can pick up:
“nous possédons” gives us a more formal version of “nous avons” un troupeau
a cattle fold is clearly a “troupeau” (or “élevage”)
“s’est transformé en véritable entreprise du jour au lendemain” works well for “turned into a full blown business overnight”
“jamais mis les pieds” is good
“contact étroit avec le bétail” and “côtoyer” could both work
I have concerns about “quelque chose à se mettre sous la dent”! It sounds as if Martine wants something to eat, as opposed to sinking her teeth into a new project. In other contexts, I might try “s’attaquer à”. What about “un nouveau défi à relever”, or simply “un nouveau projet”?
I’ve deliberately chosen not to share “perfect” versions from DeepL or Google Translate (I doubt that there is such a thing anyway).
Instead, I hope I’ve illustrated for you how I use this tool in practice. It can be a useful shortcut, because it saves time on looking words up in the dictionary or using a collocations dictionary. It can partially compensate for the lack of a practice partner or coach, but it works best if your B language is already strong, so you can filter out the dross and spot little gems.
2. Flash cards with a twist
Now let’s turn to my second technique, which is one you may very well have used when trying to add a new C language: flashcards.
Old-style flashcards (literally small rectangles of card on which you write with a pen) are as antiquated as the abacus, I suppose. Nowadays you can choose from a plethora of apps with flashy features to improve the efficiency of your revision (and make it more fun).
I’ve been familiar with some of these apps, e.g. Anki and Quizlet, for a long time, but haven’t really used them myself, since I haven’t added a C language in living memory.
However, I recently decided to help my daughter with revising biology, chemistry, and physics, and I thought electronic flashcards would be more fun than paper.
I tried Anki first, but I didn’t like the look or features. I wanted something very intuitive, quick to learn, and fun to use. So then I tried Quizlet, and loved how easy it was to add audio to the flashcards, or even images. You can even pick from a gallery of suggested images. When it comes to using the flashcards for revision, you can set them to play a matching game, or use them in a variety of different ways to learn or revise the material. The magic algorithms will ensure you spend more time on the cards you get wrong initially.
From there it was a small step to thinking “aha, I’ve been writing down vocabulary about cattle farming/barley production/distilling whisky, so I’ll create some flashcards with key words”.
Obviously if you’re working on a B language, the point isn’t to recognise and understand vocabulary in a passive language, but to be able to think of the equivalent in your B language as quickly as possible (i.e. to activate your vocabulary).
Here’s some vocabulary I was working on, related to salmon farming:
The basic version of Quizlet is free, and took me less than five minutes to set up.
You can go the DIY route and create your flashcards from scratch. Here’s an example. I’ve typed in my first two terms, finfish and halibut. You’ll see that once I typed in ‘halibut’, the system offered me suggestions for the French equivalent.
There’s an even faster way to create cards, though: use the ‘import’ function. Just copy/paste the Excel cells into the ‘import’ box:
Bob’s your uncle! The system creates 10 cards for you (or as many as you like) in one fell swoop!
Back in the day, to try to anchor this terminology in my mind and make it part of my active French, I would have reread my vocabulary lists several times (jotted down in a notebook, two decades ago, then typed into an Excel spreadsheet more recently).
My aim with the flashcards is to see the word on the front of the card and be able to come up with the French equivalent immediately, to help develop faster reflexes. Using an app is a targeted way of making improvements, since you can mark the flashcards you know well, so the algorithm only shows you the ones that still need work.
One more feature that might be helpful to retourists: you can add audio to the flashcard, to help you with pronouncing tricky words in your B language.
Now it may well be the case that everybody out there has been using these techniques for age already, and I’m behind the times. 😁 That’s OK…I’m increasingly aware that I am gradually becoming a technological dinosaur.
[By the way, if you’re interested in using AI to help you with your language learning, why not join the new AI Language Club, from the indefatigable Josh Goldsmith and Kerstin Cable? If you follow the link, you’ll find a free webinar to start you off.]
What are your fun techniques for improving your retour?
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure you know the drill: your task is to fill in the blanks with words that are grammatically correct, of an appropriate register, and plausible in terms of meaning. The article I adapted is from the Guardian, and is about gene editing. Here are the headline and subheading:
One of greatest risks of gene editing tools ‘is that the people who would benefit most will not be able to access them’
The next generation of advanced genetic therapies raises______________ medical and ethical issues that must be _______________ to ensure the _______________ technology benefits patients and society, a group of world-leading experts has warned.
Medicines based on powerful gene editing tools will begin to _____________ the treatment of blood disorders, conditions affecting the heart, eyes and muscles, and potentially even neurodegenerative diseases before the end of the decade, but the cost will put them ______________ many patients.
Trials of gene editing in embryos will probably follow, researchers say, and while the procedure has limited clinical applications, some fear fertility clinics could ____________ the technology and offer gene editing services that _______ “a new kind of techno-eugenics”.
Professor Françoise Baylis, a philosopher at Dalhousie University in Canada, said the cost of the new therapies will be _________ high for much of the global population, a situation that could “seriously threaten” the __________ for all humans to be born equal.
The experts, who _____________ from geneticists and public health researchers to bioethicists and philosophers, expect a________ of gene editing therapies to reach clinics in the next five years or so. These will correct disease-causing mutations in patients’ tissues and organs and become more sophisticated as researchers work out how to make multiple edits at once and reach difficult areas such as parts of the brain affected by neurodegenerative disease.
The same technology ____________ for therapies to enhance healthy humans, to make them faster, smarter, stronger, or more ________ to disease, though enhancement is __________ than mending single faulty genes.
The previous summit, held in Hong Kong in 2018, was _________ by controversy when the Chinese scientist Jiankui He revealed that he had edited DNA in three embryos that developed into babies, including twin sisters named Lulu and Nana. He intended to make the children immune to HIV, but was ______ __________ as reckless by the scientific community.
At millions of dollars a shot, gene editing today is prohibitively expensive. But if costs fall ____________ in coming decades, there is a risk that IVF clinics could start offering services, whether the benefits are proven or not. __________ parents might feel _____________ to use it to give their child “the best life”, Baylis said, fuelling a “new kind of techno-eugenics”.
“The next generation of advanced genetic therapies raises profound medical and ethical issues that must be thrashed out to ensure the game-changing technology benefits patients and society, a group of world-leading experts has warned.”
SUGGESTIONS:
for profound, how about serious, weighty, far-reaching, grave, or possibly acute?
you could replace thrashed out with resolved, discussed, settled.
for game-changing, you could use groundbreaking, or something like advanced, cutting-edge; or even new.
“Medicines based on powerful gene editing tools will begin to transform the treatment of blood disorders, conditions affecting the heart, eyes and muscles, and potentially even neurodegenerative diseases before the end of the decade, but the cost will put them out of the reach of many patients.”
SUGGESTIONS:
instead of transform, you could say change, alter, improve, revolutionise, modernise.
there aren’t many other options for out of the reach of, since it’s preceded with ‘put them’; you could say will put them beyond the budget.
“Trials of gene editing in embryos will probably follow, researchers say, and while the procedure has limited clinical applications, some fear fertility clinics could embrace the technology and offer gene editing services that fuel “a new kind of techno-eugenics”.”
SUGGESTIONS:
where the text says ‘fertility clinics could embrace the technology’, you could choose adopt, take up, take on board, or make use of.
Instead of fuel, you could say lead to, encourage, feed, create, or trigger.
“Professor Françoise Baylis, a philosopher at Dalhousie University in Canada, said the cost of the new therapies will be prohibitively high for much of the global population, a situation that could “seriously threaten” the aspiration for all humans to be born equal.”
SUGGESTIONS:
prohibitively could be replaced with exorbitantly, excessively, extortionately, unacceptably, unrealistically.
aspiration is a difficult word to replace in this context. Words like principle, which express the idea rather well, don’t fit the grammar (with the preposition + infinitive for….to be born). I suppose you could say the desire for all humans…
“The experts, who range from geneticists and public health researchers to bioethicists and philosophers, expect a wave of gene editing therapies to reach clinics in the next five years or so. These will correct disease-causing mutations in patients’ tissues and organs and become more sophisticated as researchers work out how to make multiple edits at once and reach difficult areas such as parts of the brain affected by neurodegenerative disease.”
SUGGESTIONS:
For range, vary from, run from, or go from would be grammatically correct, but I don’t any of them is superior to range from. If not for the ‘from….to’, you could simply say ‘who include geneticists etc… and….’.
Instead of a wave, you could refer to a range of or a series or variety of therapies.
“The same technology paves the way for therapies to enhance healthy humans, to make them faster, smarter, stronger, or more resistant to disease, though enhancement is trickier than mending single faulty genes.”
SUGGESTIONS:
How about replacing paves the way with makes it possible, opens the way, or even sets the scene for or lays the foundation for. ‘Allows’ isn’t suitable, because the ‘for’ changes the meaning (see this RyR post).
Instead of trickier, you can say more difficult, more complex, more complicated, more delicate, more problematic.
“The previous summit, held in Hong Kong in 2018, was marred by controversy when the Chinese scientist Jiankui He revealed that he had edited DNA in three embryos that developed into babies, including twin sisters named Lulu and Nana. He intended to make the children immune to HIV, but was roundly denounced as reckless by the scientific community.”
SUGGESTIONS:
For marred, you could use ruined, spoiled, or damaged.
denounced could be replaced with criticised, condemned, censured, vilified, rebuked, taken to task.Roundly, depending on context, means severely, bluntly, thoroughly, sharply, fiercely, violently, intensely,outspokenly, but these adverbs don’t all go with every verb. You could definitely say severely criticised or fiercely rebuked.
“At millions of dollars a shot, gene editing today is prohibitively expensive. But if costs fall substantially in coming decades, there is a risk that IVF clinics could start offering services, whether the benefits are proven or not. Prospective parents might feel obligated to use it to give their child “the best life”, Baylis said, fuelling a “new kind of techno-eugenics”.”
SUGGESTIONS:
substantially is relatively easy to replace with significantly.
prospective parents could be soon-to-be parents or, perhaps, future parents. We talk about ‘expectant mothers’, but I’m not so sure about expectant parents.
obligated: forced, compelled, duty-bound
If you’re interested in this type of material, why not join my membership site for English retourists, Rock your Retour? I regularly publish articles and exercises to help you polish your English B.
In my last blog post, I attempted to convince you of the value of speech prep, especially if you are a retourist and you use speech preparation as an exercise to develop your retour.
I outlined the process I use to create well-structured speeches, and listed 3 simple structures: linear, pros/cons, and ‘logical argument’.
In this post, I want to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about some of the shortcuts you can use to make speech prep a painless and rapid process.
Use an interview, panel debate, TV report or podcast for inspiration
The great thing about interviews or podcasts is that they often present contrasting points of view.
In the UK, for instance, if I were to watch Question Time on TV, listen to Any Questions on Radio 4, or tune in to the Today programme for some of the interviews, I would be able to pick out several viewpoints, which I could then incorporate into a speech.
This is particularly useful when you yourself have a strong opinion on a subject, and you need inspiration for the opposing viewpoint.
Let’s say you listen to a programme an EU proposal relating to Member States’ obligations to report on the gender pay gap.
Right off the bat, I can think of two ways you could structure your speech:
Explain the EU proposal and why it’s being introduced (i.e. the European Commission’s point of view)
Explain other parties’ point of view or reaction (for example, some of the Member States, if they have concerns; and/or women’s groups; or the European Parliament position)
Come to a conclusion, and perhaps give your own opinion. Of course, you also need an introduction to lead into the subject.
Here’s a second option:
Briefly outline the proposal
Explain the benefits of such legislation.
Outline the pitfalls. Here, you could explain who is opposed: NGOs, certain countries?
Draw your conclusion. Again, you will also need an introduction.
It’s clear, I think, that both speeches would cover much the same material, but with a slightly different slant. The first version focuses more on different points of view; the second is more of a ‘pros and cons’ speech.
A third possibility would be for you to play the role of a particular individual or organisation (for example, an employers’ organisation, an anti-discrimination NGO, a representative of the European Commission, a Minister for Equality from a Member State, etc.) and speak in favour or against the proposal. Your speech might look something like this:
Greetings/introduction
Background to the proposal
Your organisation’s view – list of reasons why you support or oppose the proposal
Call to action
Example (in English)
Let’s prepare a speech about asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats. The UK government is proposing that anyone entering the UK illegally via this route should be barred from receiving asylum.
DON’T START YET! Read through the next couple of paragraphs.
[If you’re reading this before 8th April 2023 and you have plenty of time to get more background, you can listen to quite a lengthy interview with the Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Radio 4’s Today programme, followed by some analysis by the political editor. The interview begins at 2:10:00.]
Alternatively, here’s a clip from Al-Jazeera which we’ll use for this exercise, looking at the issue from several different angles (the UK government position, the charities’ position, the asylum seeker position).
Now set a timer.
As you listen to the Al-Jazeera clip, note down the arguments on either side.
Add any of your own thoughts or background knowledge.
If your English is a B language, and you’re preparing your speech in English (see my previous posts for the many benefits of doing this to improve your retour), now is the time to list a few useful terms or phrases to include in your speech (just one example: ‘a totemic issue’).
Now think about your conclusion. Here are a few starting points; you can pick the one that speaks to you the most, or something else:
Do you think the proposal is shocking? Sensible?
Can you draw parallels with the approach taken in another country?
Do you want to say something about the potential consequences?
Do you think the proposal is unlawful and in violation of international law?
This is your chance to send out an unequivocal message to wrap up your speech, and to give your personal opinion.
Finally, now that you know the ‘destination’ of your speech, think about the starting point, which will form your introduction. Here are some possibilities:
you could simply mention hearing this interview on the radio or seeing images on tV, and finding it fascinating/shocking/revealing/depressing
you could do a quick bit of extra research to start your speech with a figure, for example the number of people making this dangerous crossing in 2022 compared to previous years
you could mention refugee crises elsewhere, to put this one into context (Ukraine, Syria)
you could use a different context, and talk about people trying to reach Lampedusa and drowning
you could begin with a reference to human rights, e.g. the right to safety and security, and international law on asylum
you could start with a personal anecdote, for instance if your parents or grandparents were refugees or immigrants
I’m sure you can think of many more.
OK, you’ve got your intro, conclusion, and the middle bit. 🙂
Now write out your speech outline in a more organised form, whether that be a mind map or a bullet point outline. As I said in my last post, some people write the whole thing out in longhand, but I think the result is generally much better if your speech is based on bullet points, which you (semi-)improvise around.
That’s it! Stop the timer. How long did it take you?
If you have time and you want to practise your speech (for example, if it’s in a B language), rehearse it now. Why not record it and listen back to your performance?
Here are my outline and my speech. Normally, I would just write keywords in bullet point form, but I fear that would be totally illegible, so I’ve written something a little longer to make sure you can follow my reasoning.
Intro: In 2022, 46,000 people attempted the dangerous Channel crossing in a small boat. Hundreds of people have drowned. This is an illegal route into the UK; the question is, is this a criminal issue that the government needs to crack down on, or a humanitarian crisis that needs solving?
Government point of view: this is a right wing government (i.e. generally anti-immigration), and the issue has become totemic. It’s costly (hotels cost £6 million per day); there is an illegal trade in people-smuggling that must be stopped. Drawing inspiration from Australia, the latest proposal is that if people enter the UK via an illegal route, they will NEVER be able to receive asylum, and will be detained and removed (to Rwanda). This is a necessary and proportional deterrent, and if people’s route into a country is blocked, the numbers attempted entry fall (Australian example).
Local charities: asylum seekers are treated like criminals. They are fleeing conflict and persecution. There should be a humanitarian route into the UK, e.g. with a visa scheme like the one in place for Ukrainians.
For the asylum seekers in Calais, the situation is dire. French police break up the camps every two days, there are no welcome centres to host them, and no legal way to enter the UK. They feel like they have no other choice. But this new legislation won’t stop them trying to cross the Channel.
Conclusion: intractable problem. In an astonishing piece of spin, the government is trying to present a crackdown as a humanitarian act, by suggesting that this is humanitarian deterrence (and if anyone manages to cross, they will be sent to a safe place, i.e. deported to Rwanda!). Will they succeed in presenting the issue in this way? Or in stopping the boats and deporting asylum seekers (no-one has gone to Rwanda so far; the proposal is mired in legal controversy). The problem for the government is their very clear slogan: “stop the boats”. There will be no fudge, as it will be very easy to judge whether this has been achieved or not.
This is a speech lasting nearly six minutes; it contains several points of vie, one or two figures, some important background knowledge (e.g. the names of the Home Secretary, the whole situation of asylum seekers in Calais), and a bit of logic in the conclusion.
In sum, I would class this as an exam-style speech, which took me less than 30 minutes to research, outline, and record.
In my next blog post, I’ll be talking about other shortcuts to help you prepare speeches quickly and easily.
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