Meeting the interpreter of the President of Ukraine
Today, as part of the #OpenLectureSpace project, a guest lecture "The Mastery of Simultaneous Interpretation" was held at West Ukrainian National University. Students and teachers of B. Havrylyshyn Education and Research Institute of International Relations spoke with Sylvester Nosenko - interpreter of the President and First Lady of Ukraine (2020-2022), leading translator at GDIP Media Center.
During the meeting, the speaker told the participants about simultaneous interpretation, its features, advantages and disadvantages, constructs and clichés, how to learn to quickly find them and how to master this art, outlined the most important skills: choosing the right words and always understanding your target audience, and memorization, because simultenous interpretation uses short chunks of short-term memory, while consecutive interpretation uses short-term memory for longer passages, but both types require a voluminous memory. Thus it is necessary to learn thousands of words, stay neutral and intervene in time, constantly study and monitor speech patterns.
Sylvester Nosenko noted: "Translating speeches for the President before and during the war are significantly different: if until February 24, they were ceremonial meetings in custom-made suits, then with the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, I worked in the subway, especially in the first days. Simultaneous interpretation requires a sound-proof booth, you listen through the earpiece and almost immediately translate through the microphone to the listeners - these are ideal conditions, but during the war there were all kinds of situations. Therefore, the interpreter must quickly adapt to the situation that has arisen and find a way out of it."
Students later noted that it is very cool to communicate with people like Sylvester Nosenko, because he managed to combine important information with modern and relevant memes, which was a good tool for audience engagement, captivated listeners and encouraged fruitful work.
We look forward to new meetings!
