Interpreting is a complex and demanding skill that requires precision and professionalism.
To improve your interpreting skills, practice regularly in a variety of environments. It will help you to become more confident and efficient in your interpretation work.
Here are some tips on how to practice your interpreting skills:
Attend events for exposure and experience
Research and go to events where interpretation is required. It could be international business meetings, conferences, or seminars. It may also be forums where people from different cultures need to communicate with each other. By observing how professional interpreters work in these environments, you will learn precious things and expectations from an interpreter.
Use a variety of resources
To improve your language proficiency, use all available media, such as books, newspapers, websites, films and tv shows. By increasing your knowledge, vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, you will better equip yourself to handle the challenges of interpretation work.
Advance your vocabulary
During interpreting a speech in a business meeting, seminar or conference, you will not be given enough time to open the dictionary, go through it to find its meaning, and use the correct word. Therefore, having a vast source and target language vocabulary with the correct definition is almost mandatory.
Use technology to practice listening skills
Using media will help you develop essential listening skills for interpretation work.
Many websites offer recordings of native speakers talking at different speeds. You can also find online quizzes which test your ability to understand spoken English.
Keep in mind cultural differences
Interpreters should have a deep cultural understanding of interpreting the languages they work with because every culture has many subcultures and dialects. A native speaker’s ability to understand the standard local cultural norms and spoken idioms or phrases helps to convey the message seamlessly without dealing with cultural differences. An interpreting agency prefers the cultural knowledge of applicants so that the audience or the clients will benefit from this in-depth exposure.
