Let’s imagine for a moment an artificial language where every word with a positive connotation (such as “good”, “love”, “safety”, “food”, etc) is of the female gender and everything negative and unpleasant (“sickness”, “death”, “hunger”, “despair”) is masculine. In such a situation, would it be possible that after internalizing the idea that feminine equals good, […]
“(9) How many language simultaneous interpreters should there be in an event?”
Each project and situation is different, so it would be dangerous to generalize. First of all, ‘redundancy’ is a widely accepted engineering concept. Using two elements or components instead of just one increases what is called ‘failure tolerance’ i.e. the ability of the system being designed to recover from a malfunction. Same could be said […]
“(8) Simultaneous interpretation and the Brain.”
Simultaneous interpreters must do many things at once, including listening to the spoken source language, observing tone and body language, remembering what is said, translating the message into another language, and then speaking the message in that language. As interpreters complete this process and produce speech in the target language, the source language speaker does […]
“(7) Some recommendations to assist with simultaneous interpreters.”
Practice in your native language. Spend some time repeating word-for-word right along with any material you may need to interpret in the future, such as a short speech. Your practice material should be no longer than 1-3 minutes to begin with, and you should record yourself and play it back to see how close you […]
“(1) Common problems of non-equivalence at word level.”
It means that the target language has no direct equivalent for a word which occurs in the source text. The type and level of difficulty posed can vary tremendously, depending on the nature of non-equivalence. Different kinds of non-equivalence require different strategies , some very straightforward, others more involved and difficult to handle. Since, in […]
“(3) Difference Between Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter Words.”
Another interesting aspect of grammatical gender in languages is that there seems to be no consensus on what makes a word (or object the word is referring to) either masculine, feminine, or neuter. In German, you get the curious examples of the word for “girl” being neuter – das Mädchen – and the word for “manliness” being feminine – die […]