Salami technique vs short décalage in retour

Hi! Welcome to the Complete Interpreter podcast by the Interpreting Coach.

Why 'Complete Interpreter'? Because you're not just a translation machine, you're also a person and a business owner, and I hope to help you take a 360 view of yourself and share some great tried-and-tested strategies to improve your interpreting skills, mindset, and marketing.

In this episode, I talk about two strategies for simultaneous: salami technique (also known as segmentation or 'chunking') and keeping a short décalage to try to avoid omissions.

Both of these can be successful techniques for retourists (although I have a personal preference 😉). You can improve your chances of success with targeted exercises.

For salami technique, work on:

identifying units of meaningreformulating units of meaning out loudexercises to improve your analytical skillssummary exerciseschoosing to start each sentence in a different place in simultaneous (as an exercise to help you get away from the word order of the source material)sight translation

For a short décalage approach, work on:

sentence finishing exercising'cloze' or gap filling exercisessight translationB>B reformulation exercisesbackground knowledgesyntax - make sure it's rock solid.

You can combine both techniques by learning to manage your décalage so that you can shorten or lengthen it if necessary, and by remembering that salami technique doesn't necessarily meaning chopping a long sentence into lots of smaller ones.

Sometimes, it just means rejigging the syntax of the source material to give you more options in the target language, i.e. removing instances of subordination (e.g. relative clauses) and using open syntax with clauses connected by 'and, but, so' (or their equivalents).

Hope this episode gave you some food for thought.

You can find lots of suggested exercises in Andy Gillies' Conference Interpreting: A Student's Practice Book.

Let me know what you'd like me to talk about next!

Sophie (aka The Interpreting Coach)

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A podcast to help spoken language conference interpreters or public service interpreters stand out in a competitive market by improving their skills, mindset, and marketing.

• No. of episodes: 54
• Latest episode: 2025-02-17
• Education

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