I distinctly recall the first time I had to interpret. A cruise ship had arrived from France and its captain had written a speech addressed to the townspeople. The interpretation was from English to Japanese, rather than the Japanese-to-English I had much more confidence in. Regardless, it was still something I had been prepared for. I had taken a course over the past year to brush up on my interpretation skills, but these were all using practice audio. The practice audio doesn’t prepare you for the inevitable small little factors that add difficulty to translation. The wind was strong and interfered with the microphone. The captain, who spoke with a bit of an accent and whose word choice differed from native English speakers, spoke for a bit longer than I was used to before pausing, which would have been fine had the strong wind not made using my notepad difficult. I was forced to forego my notepad entirely, rely on my memory, and think of translations for difficult and specific words on the spot. All in all, thanks to my practice it had went well, but this experience only further drove my desire to immerse myself more in speaking and interpretation such that I was completely comfortable even in sub-optimal conditions.

The silver lining of not using my notepad was that it forced me to condense what was said to the most important points. When writing notes, it’s easy to quickly jot down the main components of a sentence, which greatly improves the accuracy of your translation. You still want to aim for accuracy when consecutive interpreting without notes, but the most important thing is to remember the important information and convey that to the audience / other person. This can be difficult at first as it feels different from how you usually listen to people speak. It feels sort of like recalibrating your brain to prioritize important information instead of processing it sequentially, but once you can think this way, interpretation becomes significantly easier.

And as a final note: don’t get tripped up. It’s easy to lose your footing and obsess over a mistake you made, but you want to dedicate 100% attention to what is being said currently instead of dwelling on something that happened five minutes ago. The worst thing that can happen is getting totally lost after making a mistake, so you should instead listen even more intently to get yourself back on track. Never, ever give up!