Best Practices for Speakers in Multilingual Conferences
When presenting to an audience that relies on simultaneous interpretation, how you speak can directly impact how your message is received.
These tips outline practical ways to help speakers communicate clearly and effectively, ensuring interpreters can accurately convey your ideas in real time across languages.
Speak clearly and at a moderate pace Interpreters need time to accurately process and render your message in another language—avoid speaking too fast. Interpreters may need to ask you to slow down.
Use clear, structured language Short sentences and organized thoughts help ensure accuracy and clarity in interpretation.
Avoid long, complex sentences, slang, cultural references, idiomatic expressions, and quotations These can be difficult or impossible to interpret accurately across cultures and languages. Review your speech or presentation materials for these issues
before speaking
Pause before responding to questions Give interpreters time to finish relaying the question before answering
Share materials in advance Providing slides, speeches, or reference documents allows interpreters to prepare terminology and context and become familiar with the subject matter. Before the session or during a break, interpreters may wish to ask speakers questions for clarification, so be prepared to answer them.
Use a microphone consistently and properly Ensure your microphone is on, close enough, and avoid turning your head away while speaking. Microphones are usually very sensitive; do NOT touch the microphone while speaking, to avoid sound distortion for the interpreter.
Minimize background noise Distracting sounds or side conversations can interfere with interpretation quality.
Don’t read too quickly from a script Reading too fast can make it impossible for interpreters to keep up. If you read, do so naturally and at a steady pace.
Acknowledge the presence of interpreters Understanding that you’re working as a team enhances communication and encourages mutual respect.
Stick to the scheduled language Avoid switching languages mid-speech unless planned and coordinated with the interpretation team.
Be aware of non-verbal communication e.g, gestures that the interpreters may not be able to see.
AVOID
Metaphors
Metaphors may mean nothing in certain cultures, or worse, could be offensive to some people.
Jokes
Especially the ones that could be construed as discriminatory, offensive or simply not funny.
Excess data
Give the audience a chance to process the information, many intrerpreters are translating in their heads!
Highly technical vocabulary or jargon
Unless the interpreters have had time and documentation to prepare for a technical meeting.
"As a human literary translator, I’m among those facing down that challenge. But we’re not replaceable just yet."
"I’ve looked at plenty of machine translations. At this moment, I’m not worried about what AI (including large-language models trained on my copyright work) can actually do. As a human, I too am a “large language model” (God help me) – but I am also more than that. No, whatAI can do is not yet a threat to human translators and human readers of sophisticated, textured human writing. The threat is what some people think it can do."
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