‫الجامعة السعودية االلكترونية‬

‫الجامعة السعودية االلكترونية‬

‫‪26/12/2021‬‬
 DTRA310 Week 5
Chapter 3
• Consecutive without Notes (Using Memory)
• Consecutive Interpreting Practice: Interpreting
from English into Arabic (In-class Activity)
 Interpreting without Taking Notes (from
Memory)
Interpreting without taking notes, or from memory, is something
that many interpreting students (and practicing professionals!) find
rather daunting. There are a number of reasons for this:
 Many people are convinced they have a poor memory.
 Outside the world of interpreting, we are very rarely required to
remember speech of more than a few seconds of speech in any
detail.
 This type of exercise is often part of the admission tests and exams
which themselves are nerve-wracking affairs.
 Students are often given little or no instruction as to how to best
recall information in a speech, and consequently are not very good
at it.
A Word about Memory
 Three Types of Memory Relevant to the Interpreter:
1. Echoic Memory: Echoic is the retention of sounds or images for just
a few seconds without any mental processing of the information. So
in consecutive, we either send information unprocessed from echoic
memory to the notepad or to the working memory.
2. Short-term or Working Memory (Lasting a few seconds): Working
memory then has the job of processing. From there we either create
notes or long-term memories. This processing has to be done quite
quickly because working memory has a limited capacity.
3. Long-term Memory: Long-term memory for the consecutive
interpreter is simply the length of time between hearing the speech
and having to interpret it.
Chunkin
g
Chunking is one way of processing information and it means joining
small bits of information together into a larger unit, or chunk.
 If we do not process information in some way, it will be forgotten.
And working memory can only deal with a small number of items at
one time.
 However, if you can group smaller items together into larger
meaningful chunks, each chunk functions as only a single item in
your working memory, thus allowing you to stock more information
without changing the size of your working memory.
Different Ways of Processing Information in a
Speech
There are a number of different ways of processing information in a
speech, mostly by creating chunks from it according to the different
prompts described below:
 What you Already Know
 Narrative Prompts
 Visual Prompts
 Structural Prompts
 Logical Prompts
What you Already
Know
 It’s very easy to correctly repeat what a speaker has said if you
already knew and understood what he was saying. That is because
you will not be remembering new information but simply recalling
something that was already in your long-term memory.
 Interpreters are by no means always faced with new material.
Broad general knowledge, combined with targeted preparation
(and eventually experience of a multitude of speeches), means that
interpreters can have – indeed should aim to have – a very good
idea of what the speaker is going to say before they say it.
What you Already Know: a Real
Example
 Let’s look at a real example. It is quite likely that an interpreter
who is familiar with the US culture and history would already
know all of the following information in the example below, and
would therefore easily be able to remember it rather than note it
down or worry about forgetting it!
Example:
Thanksgiving is, of course, a very special day for all Americans. Its
origins go back to the Plymouth settlers, who held a harvest feast in 1621
after a successful growing season. In 1789, President George
Washington proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day, setting
Thursday November 26 as a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer”.
Narrative Prompts
 Why can we effortlessly recount the plot of a 90-minute film to a
friend days or weeks after we saw it? Or recount a 20-minute story
we heard the day or week before?
 Stories are easy to remember because one event generally leads
causally to the next, so remembering any event in the story will lead
us to recall both what preceded or followed it.
 We also relate to and/or visualize what is going on in a story, which
involves other parts of our memory and reinforces recall.
 Using this type of memory prompt is a good idea for the student
interpreter.
Visual Prompts
 For many people, associating information to visual images, real or in
the mind’s eye, is an extremely powerful memory tool. It is a form of
processing that moves information from the short-term to long-term
memory.
 The following exercise is an extremely useful way of learning to
interpret relatively long speeches without notes.
 This will give you confidence that you can remember a lot of
information if you know how to.
 And it will also give you confidence in your public speaking, a skill
you are still practicing but which you are now practicing together
with the new skill of remembering!
Visual Prompts
Example:
 Find a picture of a
landscape, a big machine, a
vehicle or any other object
that you are familiar with.
Find five or six things in the
picture about which you
can give one or two bits of
information or talk about
for 30 seconds.
 The whole “speech” should last between two and five minutes. The
information you give should be directly related to what is in the
picture so that part of the image triggers the interpreter’s memory.
Structural
 Knowing that a speech will adhere to a certain structure will help
Prompts
you to remember that speech when interpreting from memory.
Example:
One of the most basic and best-known structures for a speech might
be for, against, conclusion. That structure will work in the same way
as chunking did above. By identifying or giving this structure to a
speech, you have turned a multitude of bits of information into three
chunks, which will be far easier to recall as a result.
 For, against, conclusion structure: A logical argument explaining
the “for” and “against” of an issue and a “conclusion” arising from
those arguments.
Logical Prompts
 This memory technique relies on the interpreter being able to
recover information from their memory because of its logical
association to other elements of the speech and also our reaction to
the information – whether something was positive or negative, a lot
or very few.
 So recalling the main point X will cause details Y and Z to emerge
from your memory, even though you would not have recalled them
spontaneously. According to this technique, interpreters need only
to ask themselves the right questions to prompt recall of what
follows in the speech.
Consecutive Interpreting Practice: Interpreting from English
into Arabic (In-class Activity)

Interpret the speech at the following link from English into

Arabic (Consecutive Interpreting).

Speech Domain: Agriculture

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/sr/speech/what-future-our-agriculture-da
y-dialogue
Reference
Gillies, Andrew (2019). Consecutive Interpreting: A short
Course. Routledge. London and New York.
Thank
You