Putting Consecutive in Order: Reassessing Priorities and Skills in the Teaching of Consecutive Interpreting 

In multilingual healthcare encounters, the best conditions for meaningful participation and communication exist when the participants jointly manage the encounter. This entails co-constructing and tightly coordinating the dialogue while pacing the flow, and taking into consideration the setting, cultural, and contextual factors, as well as the needs, roles, and limitations of the participants.

To achieve this goal, interpreters frequently have to intervene to explain or clarify. This can include informing the participants about impediments to meaningful communication (lengthy or overly technical utterances, verifying intended meaning, etc.) Ideally, interpreters should inform participants about their own limitations in order to manage the flow with confidence. 

In general, in the teaching of consecutive interpretation (CI) the emphasis has been on encouraging interpreters to develop technical skills to gain the ability to retain long utterances without having to interrupt the participants. However, prioritizing technical mastery fails to address the higher need to focus on the existing conditions, goals, and disparities often found in an encounter. Failure to do so can lead to an oversight of the actual communication needs of all participants, primarily those without formal education or shared cultural background.

In this webinar, the presenter will concentrate on the reassessment of priorities in the teaching of CI from this perspective.

Learning Objectives:

• Reassess the teaching of consecutive interpretation from the perspective of core values and ethical canons.
• Review and eventually adopt conceptual approaches and cognitive and technical concepts, strategies, and resources for the teaching of CI, including memory and note-taking.

About the presenter:

Jaime Fatás-Cabeza is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the undergraduate program in healthcare and legal interpreting and translation at the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Arizona, where he also teaches medical Spanish to doctors in the Emergency, Family, Internal, and Behavioral medicine departments. He is certified by CCHI (Eng/Spa), the United States Courts (Eng/Spa), and by ATA (Eng < Spa). He is a commissioner with CCHI, has been on the Board of the NCIHC, and is a member of the NCIHC’s Home for Trainers Webinar Work Group, an initiative of the Standards and Training Committee. Jaime is a published translator and author. He translates and interprets regularly for academic publishers, biomedical research units, and legal services.