“Control of the situation is the most important thing, while interpreting”: master-class by Paolo Torrigiani in the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation!

How to overcome the anxiety? Is it normal to be stressed, while interpreting in the booth? What to do, if the speaker is too fast? These are urgent questions for almost every budding interpreter. Paolo Torrigiani, the Head of the Italian Unit of the Directorate General for Interpretation of the European Commission shares his professional experience and says: “Control of the situation is the most important thing, while interpreting”. Paolo is a real embodiment of the Italian kindness and the European hospitality! The expert treats the Master students with the sweets from Brussels and asserts: “We are going to have a very fruitful week”.Of course, Master students have a lot of questions, connected with the choice of the right interpreting strategy: how to work with figures; whether there are methods to eliminate hesitation while interpreting; how to organize constant interpreting trainings in order to achieve better results. Paolo takes note of everything that is interesting for future interpreters and is ready to explain and practice everything. Still during training, it is important to improve both foreign and native languages in addition to strategies and skills. Paolo emphasizes, that rapid adaptation to a speaker is an important aspect in terms of interpreting, especially when the speech is fast anddense. According to the expert, it is necessary to consider the audience expectations, swiftly defining what things are significant and what can be omitted. The trainer and the students discussed the interpreter’s dress code approach and the fundamentals of appropriate “presentation” while interpreting. During the training Master students also had an opportunity to work on their skills of the consecutive speech analysis. Paolo shared his choice of interpreter’s note-taking symbols and showed the appropriate way to write down even dense sentences. Speaking about the right way of speech writing for interpretation while training, Paolo Torrigiani gave a piece of advice to master students and offered them to make up several texts according to one of the traditional speech writing structures; he also emphasized the heterogeneity of the training speeches on a number of sites, such as “Speech Repository” etc. To sum up, this week was quite impactful, the Master students got a lot of new knowledge and impressions, but unfortunately Paolo’s visit is over. We are sure, that the experience gained during five-day training will help Master students to improve their skills of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting.