Consecutive Interpreting Without Notes: 4 Memory Techniques

hi my name is Andy Gillis I'm a freelance interpreter and interpreter trainer and I've been asked to say

something about how we can do consecutive without notes off from memory in this film today why might we

want to do notes why might we want to do consecutive without notes well first of all you have admissions tests to the

interpreting schools very often doing a short speech of two or three minutes without notes as part of those tests and

secondly very often the first three or four months of the course will involve doing consecutive but not taking notes

and one in the same time I and other trainers have noticed that often students are asked to do these

consecutive without notes but they're not actually given any instructions as to how to do it so in today's film I'd

like to do two things first of all give you a few ideas as to how you can listen so that you can do consecutive without

notes and in doing that demonstrate that it's not you personally that has a good or bad memory but rather that if you use

your memory correctly then you can remember an awful lot and that in turn will later mean that we have less

reliance on notes in consecutive when we do eventually come to take notes but let me first of all just say something

quickly about memory itself and then I'm basing myself a little bit here on an excellent passage in Robin çetin and

Andrew Darren's fantastic book about a conference interpreting called conference interpreting and they

described three types of memory for the purposes of consecutive interpreting the first is echoic memory the second is

working memory and the third is long term memory let me just say a little bit more about those so a character is

basically when you hear a sound and that phonetic sound just resonates in your mind or your ear for a few seconds

usually we would associate that with proper names or with numbers they just we can hear them and we have to do

something with them sometimes we write them straight down onto the notepad without really thinking

about what they mean alternately we do nothing with them and they very quickly disappear and get forgotten and then the

other thing that you can do is something that is echoing around in a karika memory is send it to your working memory

a working memory is where was where all the hard work happens in the brain we put things together we work out what

they mean what the message bind them is and again with working memory once information is in there there are two

things or three things that we can do with it one nothing and it gets forgotten to put it into our notes for

recall later or three process it so that it then moves into long-term memory and that we can remember it much later and

there's a diagram on the screen here just to show you briefly how that might look if you wanted to create a schematic

out of it the diagram also shows of course the general knowledge plays an important part both in working memory

and long-term memory if you know something already it takes up less of your working memory to process something

and if you know something already it's already in your long-term memory so it doesn't need to be added to it but

that's not regeneration already the subject of today's film so I won't go into that but do keep it in mind so I

wanted to describe to you four maybe five memory prompts that can help you to listen to a speech and remember it the

first is a narrative prompt secondly a visual prompt the third a structural prompt the fourth illogical prompt and v

is notes but notes obviously are not the subject of today's film so we'll just look at those first four and what I'm

going to suggest is that by E deciding in advance of listening to a speech how you're going to listen to it

and use one of these tools you can remember a great deal of the speech so let's first look at the narrative tool

that basically means stories if you watch a film or you read a book it's no problem at all to tell somebody about

the plot of that film 10-15 minutes a couple of days later you can remember it very easily the human brain is geared to

remember stories and so we can benefit from that as consecutive interpreters I can give you a very good example if you

look at the Steve Jobs commencement speech that I've shown you a screenshot of on the screen at the moment you'll

actually see that it's made up of three five-minute stories try listening to one of them and you'll see that knowing in

advance that it's a story and listening to it as a story means that you can remember almost all of the detail

without any notes at all now in practice of course whole speeches aren't just one story but we'll come back to that a

little bit later next visual prompts it's very easy to link information to something that you

can actually see now that might be a picture or an actual object let me give you an example of what I mean if you you

can see on the screen at the moment a self-driving car and I just want to talk to you about the glass dome on the roof

in that glass dome there is a lead our cameras made up of either 32 or 64 lasers which revolve around the car and

detect objects and measure their sizes in a range of anything between 60 and 200 meters and that mean creates for the

car's computer a 3d map of the surroundings and the software in the car's computer will then classify the

objects by their size their shape and their movement patterns it's very technical and at the moment it's very

expensive that cost about $70,000 okay so I've just given you about one minute's information about that one part

of the picture if you are now to stop this film and try and remember what I said you'd be able to just because the

car is in front of you and you're associating that information with the dome on the roof now I can do the same

with five other parts of the car as indicated by the arrows in the picture and you would then have five times one

minute of information a five minute speech quite technical quite difficult which you could remember very very well

this is particularly useful and come in consecutive interpreting because very often we are actually in front of the

object that's being talked about it might be a landscape a building a machine or just a PowerPoint slide but

we can see the thing and we can associate information to the picture that's a very powerful tool for

remembering things another thing that's also very interesting is that interpreters

generally teach that we should write down things like numbers and dates what you'll notice is that it's actually very

intramembranous oh ciated with a picture even without notes ask yourself how many cameras are there in the lead our radar

how much did the leader radar cost I bet you can still remember sometimes we aren't actually in front of a picture of

something we can see and that's being talked about but in those situations we can visualize in the mind's eye a

picture of our own and the technique is just as just as powerful a little aside in ix very interesting book about the

beginning of the conference interpreting your profession then this altered in profession there's a passage in which

one of the author's asks in 1950 andraka minka a very famous pre-war interpreter how it was that he could possibly

remember 30 or 40 minutes of speech without notes and Cominco replies basically he uses a visual memory

technique to do it I won't go into that here but that's how at least one of those great interpreters managed to do

such a long consecutive z' by adapting this technique okay number three we can remember things based on structural

prompts so before you listen to a speech say to yourself okay I'm going to split this speech up into

its main parts might be three it might be five it's a very famous old interpreting exercise to count the parts

of a speech on your fingers and you can do exactly that if you want a variation on the same technique you can assign a

word to each of the parts of the speech and that too will help you remember the rest of the detail what's really

happening here is in deciding on a part or a word of the speech you're processing the speech and that

processing transfers the information from your working memory to your long-term memory so it's the thinking

about it the processing that sends it to long-term memory and just saying the speech has four parts of five parts can

help you remember a great deal of any given speech the firth memory prompt is the logical prompt this is what Silesia

H called latent memory but what many people have since called the red thread which has been borrowed from French feel

or which itself is a calque from the German Porter Fadden where the expression actually exists and it means

the logical thread running through a speech so as you listen to a speech you ask yourself questions why do they do

that who are they doing that with when did they do that what did what happened after that you continue asking yourself

these questions as you listen to the speech and answering the questions obviously at the same time and then when

you come back you start at the beginning of the speech and in your subconscious you ask yourself these questions again

and it's the fact of asking these questions drags the information out or of your latent memory as Celestia which

called it and you'll find that actually almost all of the information in the speech is still there and can be

recalled if you ask yourself these prompting questions there's an interesting variety variation on this

exercise you can actually start at the end of the speech and work backwards to the front and it still works now I hear

you say okay but speeches aren't always just a story or just a picture or just a logical thread and that's absolutely

true so where these tools become very powerful is when we combine them as you listen to the speech you can choose

which technique to apply to which part of the speech and combine them so for example you say okay I'm going to break

the speech into a structure of five parts the first part is an image the second part is a story the third part is

another story and that will work more powerfully than one of the techniques alone the Steve Jobs speech that I see I

mentioned a moment ago as a is of a great example of this essentially a speech in five parts an introduction

three stories and a conclusion and if you listen to the speech in that way you can remember it's a 15 minute speech and

you'll have no trouble remembering almost all of it so you can apply one one prompt to each part of the speech

and combine in that way there's another way of combining which is to combine two or more prompts in a single part of the

speech so for example if you decide that this part of the speech is a story you can obviously also visualize the story

or you can say to yourself this story is very logical it flows and you can attack you can deal with it as a story and a

logical progression at the same time so when we when we combine these four tools they've become even more powerful so I

hope you can go away and practice now with a bit more confidence about how good your memory can be you'll have to

experiment see what works best for you not everyone has a visual not everyone might like the logical

approach but I hope I've shown you that your memory can be very very powerful and that will give you the confidence

when you come to take notes not to over rely on those notes and altogether that should make for great consecutive