London Regional Group's note-taking workshop spurs members to practice their skills

LRG’s note-taking workshop, led by Andy Gillies and held at University of Westminster, attracted a truly global group of participants. There were interpreters from as far afield as Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, with others having flown in from Prague, Zurich and Munich. This was a great opportunity to enjoy intensive, in-person training with Andy Gillies who is a leading figure in conference interpreting training and author of several of the must-read books for student conference interpreters.

Note-taking for consecutive interpreting does form a part of a conference interpreter’s training, but interpreters may find the skill gets rusty if they are working in the booth for the majority of their assignments.

Andy followed a highly structured, practical approach in this course. We were re-introduced to the component skills of note-taking one skill at a time, with plenty of opportunities for practice and to receive feedback on our notes from Andy. He himself would take notes on his i-pad which was hooked up to the screen, allowing for an explanation of the choices he had made in his notes. Of special interest to me was the session on deciding what not to note and learning where we can dare to trust our memory to fill in the blanks. This skill is particularly important where it is not possible to note everything.

There was much extra information thrown in along the way and we were pointed towards useful websites and relevant literature. And we had many fascinating conversations – for example, I was especially interested to hear about the thousands of hours it had taken Andy to add Polish as a passive interpreting language.

So all attendees should now be spurred on to start practising our notetaking again so we can polish up all those rusty corners.

Written by Antonia Coleman