‘Analysis’ is often cited as one of the most important skills in consecutive interpreting but it’s one that is less often practised in isolation.

In this film Andrew Gillies suggests 3 exercises aimed at practising your analysis skills. The first exercise, based on newspaper headlines, will train you to look beyond what is said explicitly and bring to the forefront of your mind all of the implicit information on a given subject. This will help you put what is being said in any speech into some context and better understand it.

The other two exercises train a different type of analysis, namely that of breaking speech down into it’s component parts. Students can often see a speech as an indivisible mass of words and that can be very daunting. In actual facts speeches are usually made up of small manageable (and inter-related) sections that can be portrayed on paper, or in your minds-eye.

For an interesting blog post about analysis see “Just what is analysis anyway?” 

To find out more about Andy Gillies click here

Andy Gillies is interpreter trainer and coordinator of AIIC training.