What are some of the strategies/activities you have found effective in teaching interpretation skill to students in your classrooms? How to teach Interpretation (Oral Translation) to a class of 40 students?
hi. different ideas should be appreciated by the teacher. then, by class discussions, they can decide the best oral translations for each utterance, best
Interpreting is a very practical skill that needs practical exercises.
Assuming that you have a single language pair and are starting with sequential interpreting rather than simultaneous interpreting there are skills that can be done as a group - such as note taking - with an emphasis on how to hone into the key elements of what is said.
But then you need to apply these. One approach is to have one speaker speaking for half a minute to a minute, and two people interpreting what they say. The others need to be thinking about what the interpreters do (and could be taking their own notes) and then comment and discuss it after they've heard the translations. The discussion provides both immediate feedback to the participants but also get the others always thinking about how things could be improved.Then swap roles so that everyone has a go at each role.
A variation is to have two people having a conversation using the two languages which is then interpreted. Pretend to be Trump and Putin for instance. Having a variety of contexts and subjects is important.