Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Going into presentation interpretation course

I may have the opportunity to start a course dedicated to hands-on training of interpretation of business presentations. Business presentations using a Powerpoint document displayed in front of an audience, usually small when visiting a company to pitch a service or a product is a standard situation for liaison interpreters. Based on some experience in my current course, it is also a situation that can be fairly well replicated very to close to the real thing in the classroom environment. I already wrote in the past that there are many ppt documents on the Internet, some you would expect not to be exposed in public, that can be exploited for such training based course. Ideally, such course would be alternately taught, or rather, monitored by a duo of trainers, each one native in language A and B. Schools here will not allow this to happen anytime soon, but I will compensate for too much focus on B to A with enrolling the listening part of students in a role playing set up where spontaneous questions and reactions are a requisite. Again, based on testing this approach with previous students, it has shown to be very easy to get spontaneous cooperation from students asking questions out of the blue, the fact that they have to ask questions in language A - Japanese - making them feel much comfortable. More tricks on playing with the audience may be required, like splitting it between an A natives group and an faked B-natives group, the B group being requested to ask questions to the presenter - myself - in B (French), and swapping roles between A and B groups in the middle of the course. This is the kind of course I would have liked to be participating in as a student but I am ending up delivering training in situations for which I have had no classroom training. It may be a common trait of many trainers.

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