Exercises for improving your formal register in a B language (pt 1, awareness-raising)

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'm focusing on improving your formal register (in a B language, in particular).

To me, this involves:

1. increasing your awareness of formal vs informal register
2. Vocabulary-building
3. Activating your shiny new formal vocabulary!

To improve your sensitivity to register, try the following:

• Shadow someone speaking in a formal style.
• Listen to experienced interpreters working in the same kind of setting as you (e.g. if you want to work for EU institutions, listen to European Parliament TV).
• Choose an article written in a formal style (e.g. an academic paper, an extract from a book or medical journal) and go through it with a highlighter to identify formal turns of phrase .
• Choose two articles on the same subject from two different publications. Read them and compare and contrast their use of language to try to identify instances of formal language.
• When creating glossaries or working on vocabulary enhancement, make a note if a term or phrase is particularly informal or formal.

In this way, you will be working on identifying, mimicking, and recording formal phraseology.

Let me know what you'd like me to talk about next!
 
Sophie (aka The Interpreting Coach)