How a Good Interpreter Manages to Learn How to Multi-task

Interpreters and translators are often faced with similar challenges, but interpreters must be better multi-taskers in their job. They have to listen and speak to more than one other person at the same time. But how do they do it?

The reality is that we all do that very same thing a lot of the time, but not necessarily in multiple languages. How often have you found yourself dutifully listening to someone talking to you but find yourself perking up your ears to another conversation going on at the same time? Or finding yourself in a lively group of people all talking at once. It’s not that managing multiple conversations at the same time is particularly easy, but it can be done. Like anything in life, if you have the incentive, then you can learn to get better. It’s the same with the multi-tasking interpreter.

In a way, even the German English translator must multi-task to some extent. It all depends on how fluent they are in both languages or whether they have to consciously think in the language they are translating into. The interpreter must listen and talk at the same time, in more than one language, so this is definitely a more difficult task, but not necessarily any more difficult than the example given at the beginning of this article. Think of the multiple conversation scenario. The brain has to cope with what could be very different messages being converted at the same time, while the interpreter only has to convert a single message, albeit in two or more different languages.

Professionals who choose a career in English German translation or interpreting generally go through a period of training. That doesn’t make a perfect interpreter, but it certainly sets them up on the path to being a good multi-tasker. One of the ways interpreters are trained is to first listen to a variety of recordings, audio as well as video. These should be varied and not just regular news style recordings, but the sort of more disjointed speech that many people use when they are talking. The next step is to ‘shadow’ what is being spoken by repeating the words out loud. Then, the same speech should be repeated, but using paraphrasing, making it more natural and understandable to whoever might be listening. The last step is to repeat the latter, but in another language.

German English translators have the luxury of time on their side and aim for accuracy in their translations. Interpreters do not have the time to be meticulous in their delivery, but have to get the gist across as well as they can!

German Super Words Have no Literal Translation

German translation is in a world of its own. German as a language is linguistically similar to several other European languages, but seems to be unique in its ability to construct complex words by combining several others together into a ‘super word’. These super words cannot easily be translated literally. In fact, if you have a German dictionary you might not even see some of these words in it unless it is a very comprehensive one. Professional German translators need to have a very extensive vocabulary if it is to include the rich diversity of German super words. Not sure what we are talking about?

Here are some examples below. 

Have you ever eaten ‘comfort food’ if you were bored, lonely, or just stressed out? If you do that on a regular basis, you may just put on a few extra kilos of weight, what is called in German Kummerspeck, literally ‘grief bacon.’

If you do end up with too much Kummerspeck, you will have to fight quite hard against your natural tendency to do nothing about it to shed those kilos. What is called in German Innerer Scheinehund is the tendency in each of us to put off doing now what could be done later, our ‘inner laziness’. In fact, the German term literally means ‘inner pigdog,’ which somehow or other becomes something quite different!

Have you ever thought you really wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere altogether more exotic than the place you are right now? Of course, you have. It’s common in winter, when the skies are grey and drab. Germans feel it a lot and call it Fernweh, or in English literally ‘distance pain’. Perhaps that’s why so many Germans can be found all over the world in exciting locations. They just love to listen to their Fernweh!

Some of us keep working and living the same old life until suddenly we get the feeling that we really should have done something more exciting. Maybe it’s now too late? That funny feeling that we might be missing out on something is what Germans call Torschlusspanik. It literally means ‘closing gate panic’ or in other words a fear that an opportunity is going to disappear!

Have you ever been caught out doing something you shouldn’t and have given some kind of lame excuse? Some of us do it all the time, especially kids! A poor excuse in German is called Erklärungsnot, although the literal explanation is ‘explanation poverty’!

As you can see from just these few examples alone, learning German is actually a lot of fun, so don’t leave it all to the professional German translator. German words might seem like Zugenbrechers, (tongue twisters) but most of them are easier than that and once you’ve mastered a few yourself, you can try them out on your German speaking friends!