Relief beyond belief. We're talking Canary cheese, right?

Drop your glossaries now and devote your energies to Pachauri's speech and your other subjects. Since this is usually done in Consecutive Interpreting, we will organise a real cheese tasting and you can do the real thing, in the Consecutive class some time later this term, after the exams. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will be into English but that, as we would say in English, is just hard cheese.

Seeing with your ears

We've talked about 'shadowing' and the dangers that this method represents when working between different families of languages. Remember that Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are fairly close to one another but English and German are radically different from Spanish, in structure and mental frame. We have been working on 'visual associations', of 'seeing' the sense of a text and moving from words to images and back to words.

Practise recording a documentary, either in Spanish or in English, for example, on climate change. Play the recording back and listen to the commentary without the image first. Then rewind and turn down the volume, giving your own commentary to the images and seeing how much they correspond to what you had imagined. Then do a CI (Consecutive Interpreting) of the documentary. Re-construct 24 hours later and record your re-construction. The try to do an SI from your taped re-construction. If the vocabulary doesn't stick that way, it never will! Have fun practising! Remember - what isn't fun, doesn't motivate and we need motivation to learn. Back tomorrow with more. Check out the climate change speech hung on the Moodle by Goretti. It's a good speech although certainly full of easyspeak.

In what ways does an SI glossary differ from a Translation glossary?

Let's take climate change as an example. There are various ways of producing a glossary for translation, depending upon how computer-literate you are. First, however, you look for a sizeable number of documents on the subject, in both of the languages you will be working between (this is what we call, 'parallel' texts), or more languages if you want to have a kind of terminology bank which you can then commercialise.
Here, you need to be working with reliable sources. In this case, the IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel for Climate Change) is great and even has its own glossaries prepared in various languages.
If you're doing things old-fashioned, you will go on to do the following:

1. Take an A4 foolscap and block it out into as many squares as you need to cover the alphabet in each language, back and front.
2. Get the A4 foolscap blown up on a photocopier to cover an A3. Again, back and front, and do a few while you're there so that you don't have to eternally repeat the process. This eventually will be the folder where you keep, physically, the documents that you have downloaded, printed and read for terminology, so that should you need them again, there they are, all together.
3. As you read through the documents, jot down the words that are unfamiliar. YOU SHOULD ONLY JOT DOWN NOUNS AND ACRONYMS i.e. no adjectives, verbs or other vocabulary. Write down the word alone, with no meaning.
4. As you work through the documentation on progressive days, tick off the NUMBER of times you see the same word appear. Once a word has appeared more than five times, it is BASIC. What does that mean to the effects of Interpreting? This word must now disappear off the glossary and into your head. Get the picture? This goes for acronyms as well. So, IPCC, in its Spanish version PICC should be coded inside your head, ready to be pulled out when needed for the Interpreting job, not down on a piece of paper.
5. Once you are satisfied that you've 'done' the documentation (for both languages, following the same criteria), run over the words that have appeared on a one-off basis, or less than 5 times, to verify those that are new coinages and need cleared up (e.g. leave them in English- 'carbon footprint'- or not, and if not, what is the accepted translation/interpretation), together with the words that are over three syllables or the acronyms over three letters. These, together with their translations, will be transferred to Post-Its to be 'posted' inside the booth during the SI session.
6. You will ONLY transfer the words that have eluded translation/definition and new coinages to your A3 glossary that will accomapany you into the booth. This glossary has the words and their meaning (once ascertained pertinently with the academics) written clearly in the appropriate box, ordered by their first letter. A SI glossary should NEVER have more than 10 words on it. If it does, it means you haven't done your homework adequately.

If you're a computer boffin and you prefer not to use paper but do all your glossary work on the screen, then do the same but with an EXCEL spreadsheet. Again, you are only noting nouns, because nouns are the building bricks of the structure of the interpretation between English and Spanish. Verbs are optional. The same process is valid for the final glossary which you may decide, however, to put on a Palm/laptop to take into the booth with you. Post-Its continue to be old-fashioned.

Right, now you have no excuse so, get cracking with the memory and climate change glossaries. More later ...