You can't imagine how happy I was to begin my MA in translation and interpretation at MIIS. It was the moment I'd been waiting for for more than five years. There were about ten students in the French classes, including a Moroccan man, a woman from Côte d'Ivoire, and a woman from Burundi.

The first semester, I took a mix of translation and consecutive interpretation classes. One of the professors was the most intelligent man I've ever met - I respect him enormously.

In addition, he was very nice and even funny.

I will never forget two mistakes I made that semester:

Just after the program started, I had a bike accident and broke my collarbone. The professor asked me what happened, and I said, Je me suis cassé le clavier - "I broke my keyboard."

During a debate on euthanasia, instead of saying la mort est un fait ("death is a fact"), I said la mort est une fête ("death is a party"). Everyone had a good laugh about that, and it was a good lesson of the importance of gender.)

One thing that I haven't explained yet is the classification of linguistic ability. In the field of translation and interpretation, there are three levels of ability. The A language is the mother tongue. Most people have a single A language - even a bilingual person often speaks one language much better than the other.

A language that you speak fluently is the B language, and it's possible to have several. You can translate and interpret in both directions with A and B languages: from A to B and from B to A.

In contrast, the C language is a language that you can work "from" but not "to." That is, you can translate from a C language to an A language, but never (according to the rules of translation and interpretation) from the A language to the C language. Why? Since you don't speak the C language fluently, it's too easy to make grammatical and stylistic mistakes. In short, the translation or interpretation into the C language is not of an acceptable quality. In reality, there are quite a few uncertified translators that work with any old languages, but at MIIS they stress the importance of never working into your C language.

During my second semester in the translation and interpretation program at MIIS, I finally started studying simultaneous interpretation in French and, at the same time, Spanish consecutive interpretation and translation. But it was "simul," as they say at MIIS for "simultaneous interpretation," that I really enjoyed. First of all, we had to learn to split our attention, because in simul, you have to be able to divide your attention between the source language (what the interpreter hears) and the target language (what s/he says). A good interpreter will divide his attention between the two languages, with the majority reserved for the target language. It's very important, because not only does he have to interpret the meaning of the words, but also speak correctly, in complete sentences, with good grammar, etc. The less attention that you have to use to understand the source language, the more you can devote to what comes out of your mouth.

So in the simul classes at MIIS, we first had to learn how to split our attention. We started with exercises with the same source and target language. First of all, we listened to a speech in English (using headphones) and repeated it while doodling at the same time. Next, we paraphrased a speech - still in the same language - while writing the numbers one to ten. Thirdly, we listened to the speech in French and paraphrased it in French, while writing numbers backwards: ten to one. Each exercise made us divide our attention a little more between the three activities: listening, speaking, and writing. And after several days of this, we began doing simultaneous interpretation.

It's kind of a strange task. You listen to a speech and have to not only understand it, but restate it in another language, which is not easy. Sometimes you're distracted by something in the speech and forget to interpret it. Other times, you hear your own voice drowning out the speaker's, and at that moment you have a really hard time finishing your sentence. But you absolutely have to - you can't start interpreting a sentence and let it go, even if you didn't hear what came next. You have to finish your sentence before you start another. In fact, my Spanish-English simultaneous interpretation professor always interrupted us by saying "finish your sentence!" each time we got lost. She even suggested that we invent a "magic" sentence that we could use at the moment of losing the thread of the speech, just so that we could finish the sentence before starting another. There was a student whose magic sentence was "and my dog has fleas," and the professor finally told him that maybe he should choose a sentence that was a little more magical. Imagine the situation: "The European Union decided that it needed to promote exports of European products, restrict imports of foreign goods, and... uh... my dog has fleas." Not very magical. :-)

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