How You Can Become a Better Interpreter

If you are an interpreter, your expertise will provide you with endless opportunities for personal and professional growth. Whether you seek to advance in your current job or you wish to explore new opportunities, being able to interpret languages will always present new possibilities. However, to make the most of your opportunities, you will need to continue growing your skillset. In today’s blog post, Propio will give some tips for how you can become a better interpreter.

Understand the Cultural Aspect of Interpreting

While pure interpretation and translation will always be a key in this field, understanding the cultural environment is arguably just as important. There are small intricacies and details that go with being an interpreter that will not only make your life easier, but that will also improve your interpreting ability. For example, localization skills will play a major role in your skillset because there are grammatical and language subtleties that all cultures will adhere to. If you aren’t up to date on these subtleties, you will run into roadblocks as an interpreter.

Continue Growing Your Vocabulary

The best way to continue improving your interpreting abilities is to continue growing your vocabulary. It would be a mistake to think that you understand a language completely and you don’t have room to continue growing. When you aren’t adding words to your vocabulary, you can be working on linguistic subtleties to fine-tune your interpreting ability.

Listen, Listen, Listen

Nothing is more important in the interpretation field than listening. If you are unable to listen to the people you are working with, you are going to be constantly running into barriers and regularly face unhappy customers. Interpreters need to be able to pick up on every single word in a contextually accurate way. You need to not only hear and know the words being said, but you need to know the intent and the meaning.

The easiest way to become inaccurate when it comes to your interpretations is to not listen well. If you want to grow in your abilities, continue to practice this discipline as you develop as an interpreter.