Building on the skills that students should have acquired in Consecutive Interpreting, Simultaneous Interpreting is another practical interpreting course that aims at enhancing students’ interpreting skills further, this time in the simultaneous mode. Initiation of students into simultaneous interpreting is only carried out after students are trained on a set of such preparatory exercises as listening and memory exercises, dual-/multi-task training/counting down, shadowing, summarizing and abstracting in the simultaneous mode, running commentary, smart shadowing and simultaneous paraphrase, cloze and anticipation exercises, lag exercises, sight interpreting, etc. In addition to further improving students’ oral-aural communicative competence in both working languages, the preparatory exercises are designed to consolidate students’ active listening and analysis skills; ability to comprehend, retain and repeat oral-aural and written messages monolingually and bilingually in various communicative situations in part and/or in full; and the skills and strategies necessary to cope with time constraints, split attention, heavy cognitive load and limited resources characteristic of the cognitively complex simultaneous interpreting activity. At a later stage, students are then trained on simultaneous interpreting proper transitioning from easy and controlled to real simultaneous interpreting and progressing from simple and easy-to-handle texts and text types to the processing of more challenging speeches, text types and topics.

Image Credits: Sohar University

Image credit: https://gurmentor.com/techniques-for-learning-a-foreign-language/