Professional Interpretation Services

How do you recognize a professional interpreting service?

In addition to linguistic and translation scientific content and professionalization as an interpreter, practice-related interpreting exercises are the focus of the conference interpreting. The criteria for evaluating interpreting are divided into three groups: Presentation & Communication, Content, Language.

Presentation & Communication

A professional conference interpreter should not only translate content correctly, but also attractively from one language to the other. The presentation of the interpretation is therefore crucial. The "Presentation & Communication" category includes the following aspects:

• Pronunciation: An understandable and accent-free pronunciation, both in the mother tongue and in the foreign language, is expected.

• Prosody (voice): An interpreter should neither sing nor rattle off his performance. The voice is an important tool for lively interpreting. The generic term prosody includes the following sub-items:

• correct word and sentence accent

• an appropriate sentence melody (e.g. for statements, the voice goes down at the end of the sentence, for questions it goes up.)

• Speaking speed: neither too slow nor too fast

• the appropriate use of breaks

• Complete sentences: Even if the content may be correct, but the sentences are incomplete, this has a negative impact on the interpreting performance received by the listener.

• Communicative competence: This category includes the question: does the interpreter manage to establish communication? Does he speak confidently and confidently to the listener or is he babbling to himself full of doubt and perplexity? Aspects of communicative competence include, for example, appropriate eye contact with the audience, the volume of the voice, the posture (in consecutive interpreting) and the smile (yes, the smile can also be heard through the voice!).

• Speed ​​/ duration (consecutive interpreting only): Consecutive interpreting should always be shorter than the original. So if the speaker speaks for 5 minutes, we should end up with about 4 minutes as consecutive interpreters. As a rule of thumb, it is said that the duration of consecutive interpretation should be 75% of the time of the original speech.

• Fluency: Too long or irregular pauses as well as stuttering and the use of filler words (stop, just, so) or delay sounds (mh, ehm, uh) ensure that our interpreting service is perceived negatively.

Content

The main task of a professional conference interpreter service is to fully translate the original content into the target language. The individual content aspects include:

• Completeness: the more complete the interpretation, the better. Nevertheless, every professional knows that the profession of interpreter is fraught with mistakes. Interpretation is seldom absolutely flawless and flawless. Nevertheless, an oral translation of the content should be as complete as possible. (The route is the goal.)

• Sense: What is said should make sense. Sounds logical. If an interpreter says something that distorts the meaning due to a lack of understanding or due to stress, we speak of a contresens (French for "misinterpretation").

• Cultural competence: It is not possible to demonstrate cultural competence as an interpreter in every situation, but one should not panic audibly when interpreting when familiar proper names, realia or abbreviations from areas such as economy, politics, society or history are used. The interpreter must not only demonstrate language skills, but also know how to mediate between the individual cultures. This requires knowledge of the culture of the country of the source language and the country of the target language.

• Coherence: Interpretation is coherent if the context of the statements is clear. This includes, among other things, the use of conjunctions such as: but, however, or, and, because, therefore, despite, during, because, although, although ...

• Monitoring: Monitoring is one of the tasks that the interpreter performs in addition to the actual voice transmission. The interpreter observes what is happening, his cabin partner and especially himself. A professional interpreter listens to himself during the interpreting in order to check whether what you are saying makes sense (plausibility check). Especially with simultaneous interpreting, it can happen due to stress that you might forget the verb at the end of the sentence in German.

Language

Even if the interpreter communicates confidently and the transmitted content is correct, linguistic errors can destroy the good overall impression. The classic categories of linguistic correctness include grammar, syntax and expression:

• Grammar: Correct grammar includes using the correct article, verb conjugation, and declension of nouns and adjectives.

• Syntax (sentence structure): A professional interpreter shouldn't sound like Yoda. Especially the German sentence structure can be tough. Linguistic inconsistencies can occur here, but the sentence structure used should generally correspond to the linguistic rules.

• Expression & Style: Even if the interpreter's statements may be linguistically correct, the style used may be inappropriate. One speaks of the linguistic register, or different language levels. Depending on whether we are speaking to friends or strangers, younger or older, superiors or subordinates, we also adapt our expression. This should also be borne in mind when interpreting. If we are interpreting a high-ranking politician, the choice of words is certainly different than if we are interpreting for a young person.

Do you need a professional interpreter?

If you are looking for an interpreter who tries to meet the above criteria as best as possible, We look forward to your inquiry! We, Wordpar, are your direct contact in Indian Languages, German, Spanish and also other languages we speak and provide service for. We look forward to your inquiry!