Fixing, stringing and interpreting

Interpreting as a stringer is both a slow and intensive task I tasted for two weeks. Keeping emotion at bay was the most difficult part.

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Harnessing J-Cast

I missed the fact that news portal J-Cast provides most content in English, Japanese and Chinese as well. This makes for a superb textual content source that could be put to use for training purpose. What is lacking is voice content, definitely not to the taste of locals. But is J-Cast market local? Anyway,while The Economist provides a recorded version of the magazine, I am not aware of any equivalent service for a Japanese written media. Using Text-to-voice applications could come handy if something more powerful than the standard Mac text-to-speech software is available on the market, including for Japanese. I am out of touch of the news on that domain. In the meantime, testing Presentation Prompter, a cleaner prompter software than the free online Cueprompter, I am testing rapid voice over reading of equivalent articles both in Japanese and English.

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Malaise

I am reading "Pédagogie raisonnée de l'interprétation" by Seleskovitch and Lederer. In this book as in many others, the single definition of an interpreter is that of a conference interpreter. There is not a single reference, not even a scorn toward we lesser than stellar practitioners in a world where more non-stellar interpreters in more mundane situations are providing average interpretation services. Of course, this is about a world in itself and does not try and define the multifariousness of interpretation. The AIIC has a page on community interpretation for instance, recognizing such lower level activity as a full fledged variety of its own. The matter is that many interpreters do not have formal training, nor do not offer a single high level of competence. The malaise reading that book, which is otherwise very interesting, is that one always feels somewhere in the background that sense of not meeting the requisite, not belonging. Yet there is market for lesser than stellar interpreters and methods of self-teaching and training in the age of the Internet must be assessed, discussed and spread around. This is one of my purposes here.

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Shadowing course

Things evolve in ways one cannot fathom. I was invited to do a course in a language lab based around exploiting shadowing for improving prosody and self-confidence at speaking, feeling French for Japanese students. Of course, as with the current course I am managing, everything is experimental. I have mostly no clues but intuitions on what and how to proceed, and especially craft a course that is interesting and valuable for the students. I want to position the exercise in par with jogging. Shadowing will be a jogging exercise, to strengthen the rendering and listening muscles, to make these supple, agile, less leaning on procrastination.

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