TRAINING WITH AN INTERPRETER Adventures with Translators

If you have not trained with a translator, it’s an unique and wonderful and sometimes wild and sometimes frustrating and always a learning situation. In the past two months I have trained with translators who interpreted my English into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Russian. Sometimes simultaneously, which is what I like, and sometimes sequentially which I do not like, but endure with the patience of Job. Well, maybe not Job, how about the patience of a parent.

Anyway, your training skills, competencies, and elegance can come in for a real test when you speak through a translator. For beginners, with a sequential translator, you say one sentence and then you have to hold that thought and wait for the translation, then you say another sentence and wait, and so it goes. Waiting and holding your thought as to your follow-up sentence means that if you are building up suspense for a concept or a story or a bit of humor, you now have to pace yourself in a way that you’ve not paced yourself before.