Advice for students looking to improve their A or B languages
By Julia Poger, MACI, Monterey Institute of International Studies; member of AIIC
Are you having problems because your native (A) language is not yet developed or flexible enough to interpret lawyers, scientists, and diplomats?
Is your non-native active (B) language still sounding too simple?
Having worked with young interpreters with less-than-optimal A languages, and having been a young interpreter with a less-than-optimal B language, you might be able to benefit from a few exercises to improve any of your active languages – and they have proven themselves in as little as one month of concentrated effort.
Exercise 1: Handwrite (transcribe – by hand!) articles
Find a good publication in the active language of your choice (please make sure to choose English from the US or the UK, or Portuguese from Brazil or Portugal, and do not mix them up!). For example, if you wish to improve your French, you should choose Le Monde, as that is what everyone in international organizations expects you to sound like when you work.
Pick any article on the front page, and copy it out by hand. Write out the entire article. If you have time, you should look up the words and expressions you are not familiar with.
The next day, do the same thing from that day’s publication.
Don’t worry about memorizing anything, though it does help to look up whatever words you are not certain you understand.
Exercise 2: “Sentence a day”
Find a good speech in the active language of your choice. Make sure to have both an audio and a video version of the speech, that match! This should be a speech that touches on many topics, not simply focusing on one – a State of the Union speech for American English or a speech by an erudite person on current topics. This type of speech will bring the most benefits. Please make sure that the speaker has a neutral accent in the language you are hoping to improve.
Take one sentence each day and memorize it. Write it out. Watch the video and listen also to the micropauses and intonation, and make up a notation system to note them down when you write it out.
Say the sentence out loud 10 times, then write it down from memory, with all your notations. Compare it to the original and correct yourself. Then repeat the process. Once you have written it twice correctly (and said it 20 times correctly), just go on and repeat it correctly another 180 times, checking every 50 repetitions that you are still repeating the sentence correctly.
Yes, 200 times, total. You may repeat it all in one block, or repeat it in your dead time (like washing dishes, cleaning house, walking to the metro...) throughout the day. You will see what works best for you, both for scheduling the memorization and the repetitions.
After memorizing the sentence and repeating it, never worry about it again. Don't try repeating two sentences together, don't bother reciting the entire speech. Once you have carved each sentence into your brain, they will serve you forever.
Another way of doing this is to memorize the sentence and repeat it 100 times on the day you memorize it, and 100 times on the day afterwards. If you wish to see rapid change in your active language, after repeating the sentence from the day before 100 times, you should memorize the next sentence and repeat it 100 times. So you still do 200 repetitions of sentences, but over 2 days; and you do 200 repetitions every day.
Beware of simply repeating mechanically. This will provide much less benefit than repeating in an active way. If you stay engaged and active, moving as you repeat, almost channeling the speaker, the repetitions will solidify the sentence in your long-term memory and make it easier to use parts of it spontaneously in conversation or in your interpreting.
I recommend doing this for at least 30 days. This means that you will have 30 sentences with correct articles, prepositions, and idioms and vocabulary in context, carved into your brain. This is enough to already see a great improvement in your active language. The main benefits will be memorizing new words in context, and deeply analyzing and understanding the rhythm of the sentences. Your fluency will improve, and words will start to come naturally and easily to you while interpreting.
After several days you will be tired! Your brain will start misremembering, giving you synonyms. You will start inserting words you know already. But please go back to the original. The point of this exercise is to improve your language, using words your brain wouldn't usually choose and making them the default instead of your usual vocabulary.
And while avoiding these synonyms, do please note that the word that you are substituting is correct grammatically! While it sounds like you are making a decent substitution orally, if you wrote it down, you would see that it may be an incorrect homonym. Since this is an exercise to enhance your active language with words and constructions that are new to you, please stick to what the speaker is saying.
After a few days, you will start to note the benefits in the booth, as some phrases will come out automatically. You may also start recalling new collocations better in all your languages. Sentences will flow more easily and intonation will gradually become more natural. Your interpreting will sound more natural, and more fluent. And over time, it will become easier to memorize the sentences and complete the task.
Some people have asked if 100 repetitions wouldn’t be enough. It is true, after 100 repetitions, you will feel more confident about pronunciation, rhythm, and overall flow. But when you repeat the sentence 200 times, the benefits will go deeper: the sentence structure and intonation become more automatic.
This will hurt. It will absolutely hurt your brain, which will try to distract you while you are doing your repetitions. But if you keep going, you will reap immeasurable benefits!
Exercise 3: Flexibility and multiple formulations
This is the third exercise that has helped me immensely.
If you can, it’s best to do this exercise with a native speaker of the language you are working into, so they may check that the expressions you produce have the same meaning as the original, and are grammatically correct.
Find a written speech or article, preferably with longer sentences or a denser construction. It can be in any of your languages. You may then paraphrase into the same language (A to A) or sight translate into a different language (A to B, B to A). Please ensure that you understand everything that is being said in the article before you begin.
Take the first somewhat meaty sentence (not “Good morning ladies and gentlemen”!), and reformulate it. Say it differently. Paraphrase it. Then do it at least another 15 times while maintaining all of the meaning.
You may:
Make nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns
Raise or lower the register
Take the first word, then the second word, and so on, and start a new version of that sentence with that word.
Start your sentence at the end, rather than the beginning.
Edit the sentence to put things together that belong together.
Change the structure of the sentence – divide it into two, or merge two separate sentences into one.
Produce a version in antonyms, while still meaning the same thing.
Produce a version that uses no vocabulary at all from the original sentence. Now do it again. And again!
And once you have finished these versions, make sure to do three more:
Cut the sentence up into as many tiny little sentences as you can (“the salami technique”). It will be longer, as all of the meaning is now distributed over several sentences. But it will be easier for your listener – and for you! – to understand.
Make the sentence as long as possible, using very long and involved grammatical structures that don’t hide the meaning. This is a good exercise to help you with very slow speakers or relay-givers who deliver the content in with long spaces of time in between the words.
Make the sentence as short as possible, 2-3 words that capture the essence of the meaning. This is a good exercise for when speakers are very fast.
Then do this for each next sentence, for entire paragraphs, and for the entire text.
This exercise will help you to fall on your feet in any situation. It will allow you to relax while speaking, because you know that you will be able to finish any sentence without backtracking and undermining your credibility with your clients.
Bonus Exercise: Concision, concision, concision
This is not an exercise that I have used to improve my languages, though I think it would be perfect! However, it is a practice I use when I am interpreting, and had I practiced it as a student, I would have improved much faster.
Take a piece of writing, about 150 words or so, and re-write it in 50 words without sacrificing any meaning. So, reduce the article to 1/3 of its original size while keeping all the meaning. Wikipedia articles would be a good test, as they are already very dense and have little fluff.
This exercise is an offshoot of Exercise 3 above, and will help you to learn to express yourself concisely, wherever you are.
(Credit where credit is due: I first read of this in an article on LinkedIn by Eddie Shleyner, who teaches copywriting: https://shorturl.at/XDf1F)
For examples of texts that have been made more concise, please see Chris Guichot de Fortis’s article on Degraded mode here in English: https://www.guichotdefortis.com/blog/degraded-mode and here in French: https://www.guichotdefortis.com/blog/mode-degrade .
These three exercises all have helped me to improve my Russian B language, and have also helped develop my A language.
In Belgium, students who failed their first exam session because their native language was not at the desired level did these exercises (most especially the sentence a day exercise), and then received no bad comments during their second session from the same teachers who complained just two or three months earlier.
It will take discipline and perseverance, but it will be worth it!