Self-Training Methods for Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting is a severely time-constrained, extremely demanding act of interlingual transfer: while listening to the source speech, the interpreter draws on subject knowledge to predict, comprehend, memorize and convert the message, while planning, organizing, delivering, monitoring and correcting the target output — all at once. At international conferences, SI interpreters overcome the multi-tasking strain on the brain with "lightning-fast thinking", keeping listening and speaking in parallel.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, universities in Beijing, Xiamen and Guangzhou pioneered interpreting courses for English majors. In 2000, the Ministry of Education made interpreting compulsory in the new English-major syllabus. Yet limited by faculty, class hours, equipment and teaching methods, most programs teach only consecutive interpreting — SI is barely covered. The number of SI interpreters graduating each year falls far short of market demand, so most learners must rely on self-training to get started.

A practical self-training path

1. Shadowing. Repeat the source speech half a sentence to a sentence behind — first in your native language, then in the foreign one — training the ability to listen and speak in parallel while gradually shortening the lag.

2. Retelling and summarizing. After listening to a passage, retell its gist in your own words to build short-term memory and key-point extraction.

3. Sight translation. Read a written text while delivering an oral translation — training fast sentence segmentation and linear processing; the bridge from written translation to SI.

4. Record and review. Record your practice sessions and review them against the source — omissions, awkward phrasing and broken flow become obvious.

5. Subject knowledge. Build terminology and background-knowledge bases by domain — politics, economy, technology, law. At the highest level, SI is a contest of knowledge breadth.

There is no shortcut to SI — but there is a method. Systematic training turns quantity into quality.