Simultaneous translation as a special kind of translating

As said above, during simultaneous translation the speaker pronounces his speech into the microphone, or reads it and translator hears this speech in his earphones and speaking together with the speaker interprets simultaneously. The interpreter works in a special room and can’t hear anything but the speaker’s voice. The complexity of such work is evident. Specialists pay attention to the following psychological, physical and linguistic factors that determine the interpreter’s activity:

– psychological discomfort emerges from the fact, that usually we listen to the speaker and only when he finishes we give the answer;

– psychological pressure, stipulated by the impossibility for the interpreter to correct his own mistakes;

– psychological pressure, determined by a high tempo of speaking. The worse situation happens, when the speaker reads the text as here the tempo is even higher. The interpreter must speak quickly, without pauses not to leg behind a speaker. Making ungrounded pauses looks as if an interpreter doesn’t know what or how to say, and the audience, being ignorant of the difficulty of simultaneous translation, starts questioning his professionalism;

– psychological discomfort might take place if the pronunciation of the speaker has strong accent, therefore his language is unclear;

– psychological discomfort comes from knowing that there is no connection with either speaker or audience, that the interpreter is isolated in his cubicle and nobody is capable to help him out in difficult situation;

– linguistic problems may chase the interpreter if the speaker’s language abounds in non–standard vocabulary – jargon, slang, phrasal units, idioms, pun, and other stylistic nuances and peculiarities, abbreviations, proper names, figures (precise information) which complicate the process of translation dramatically;

– structural differences of two languages, which takes some time to adapt thinking in a target language;

– new concepts, ideas and notions that are not yet fixed linguistically and have to be created on the spot this very moment;

– physical endurance is necessary to stay in closed space with minimal motion and maximal concentration for unpredicted period of time, having no time to drink or eat, relax and have some rest stretching your legs;

– Ukrainian words and, hence, sentences are somehow longer than the English ones, therefore more time is needed to just pronounce them. The problem of reducing Ukrainian sentences in some points is acute.