A Guide to Shadowing
What? How? When? Why?
The technique and practice of shadowing is an indispensable tool for both the budding and the experienced simultaneous interpreter. But it can be a controversial technique and is often misunderstood or discounted. In my opinion, however, all interpreting professionals would gain greatly from spending time both considering and practising the art of shadowing.
In this brief text I shall attempt both to describe the technique and provide some hints as to its use.
First of all, a definition:
Shadowing is listening to a live or recorded speaker, and repeating word for word - and often intonation for intonation - what the speaker is saying. It can be almost anything, depending on your goal:
official speeches by good speakers - to learn the turns of phrase and the delivery style
news programs - to practice your enunciation and speed
audible plays - to learn how to express emotion in your active languages
documentaries - to learn how to present engagingly, and something about the topic!
language learning texts - to learn accent and pronunciation
poetry - to learn to replicate the cadence of the language
…
Shadowing is useful into all the interpreter’s active languages, ‘A’ and ‘B’, and can be employed to correct and refine a multitude of interpretation weaknesses – accent, delivery, voice quality, vocal range, emphasis, ‘cleanliness’ of rendition, confidence etc. etc.
However, it is important that shadowing:
be carried out in a graduated, thorough and reasoned way
be regularly supervised and/or assessed by both the practitioner and his or her teachers, supervisors or colleagues
be carried out over many hours and in each of the linguistic combinations that it is desired to enhance
be coupled with more conventional training techniques
The practice consists of spending many hours shadowing an able and fluent speaker of the target language - in other words, saying what the speaker is saying in the same language, with the same intonation, delivery, micropauses, … at least at first!
As the goal is to replicate the neurological and intellectual demands of simultaneous interpretation, a simple laptop/smartphone-headphone combination will suffice.
Choose speakers who are expressing themselves in their mother tongue and who have an excellent mastery thereof, without strong regional accents, and with a gift of oratory which allows full expression of the native cadences of the language. It cannot be over-emphasised that your chosen speaker must be carefully selected, as a function of accent, elocution, delivery, register etc.
This is an excellent technique at many levels, as (this being a marked trend among recent neuro-linguistic and neurological expert studies) shadowing involves some 80% of the neuro-linguistic operations involved in simultaneous interpretation, the only factor missing being that of language transfer.
Shadowing initially involves repeating the words of the speaker without modification. This allows the interpreter’s brain, ears, and mouth, working in concert, to begin to reproduce the sounds and rhythms of the target language without conscious mental effort, and begins to create the ‘linguistic muscle memory’ naturally acquired by children learning their own tongue. This will require many tens of hours of actual speech production – it is essential that the language actually be voiced, or the exercise is useless.
It is also recommended, in the case of an actual or potential ‘B’ language (your active foreign language), to shadow with a text, as we cannot hear or apprehend what we do not know. If we do not hear all the articles, prepositions, and smaller sounds that make a native speaker sound native, we will not reproduce those sounds in our shadowing, and will lose much of the potential benefit. Here again, it is useful to record your shadowing, and then replay it, comparing it to the text.
The prime goal of the exercise is to accustom brain, ears and mouth to the flawless and (eventually) effortless production of the sounds and cadences of a language foreign to you - be that expressing yourself in a new way in your native language, or working on your active foreign language. The goal here is to establish a new network of synapses and neuronal pathways, this being an essential stage in the interpreter’s acquisition of each new language combination. It should not be thought that all lessons learned in the successful mastery of one combination can simply and instantaneously be transposed to another – many hours of actual practice are required for each language pair, and there are no shortcuts!
Let us now begin to look in a more concrete way at the actual practice of the technique.
While shadowing, it is important to experiment with differing levels of time lag or ‘recul’ (say from 0.5 to 5 seconds), introducing a certain elasticity to reflect the fluctuating demands imposed by the speaker and to train the brain to cope with larger or smaller linguistic buffer spaces in the language combination being employed.
At the same time, gradually introduce expressions of your own, allowing for varying semantic (but of course not substantive) distance from the speaker. At one extreme you may wish to decide in advance to modify one or two words per sentence, and at the other to leave only one or two words unchanged.
Your goal is to approach, in the ‘B’ language, the facility of an experienced interpreter’s work into his/her mother tongue. Therefore, it is also important to train both voice and brain to ensure acceptable linguistic production while mental processing efforts are required elsewhere. To this end, it is useful while shadowing to practice (for example) writing numerical sequences involving fixed gradations (1, 3, 5, 7… or 1, 6, 11, 16, 21 etc.), which can then be self-checked after the exercise, along with the recorded interpretation.
Another variant might involve writing down poems or song lyrics, which the interpreter already knows by heart, while interpreting. The goal is to guarantee an acceptable level of linguistic production even while mental processing efforts are devoted to other, more noble, tasks such as actually understanding and transposing concepts and ideas! Such exercises are useless, of course, unless you assess both spoken and written productions for accuracy and acceptability.
Many interpreters experience difficulties in the booth, in adopting a register or ‘persona’ which differs from their own. Shadowing can be very helpful in acquiring these more thespian-related skills which can so often make the difference between a good and an excellent interpretation. Thus, shadowing speakers who are expressing joy, grief, anger, sorrow or enthusiasm, will begin to instill the required ‘muscle memory’ that will allow the interpreter to appropriately and confidently to transmit the entire message and sentiments of the speaker - especially when lack of the appropriate vocabulary or register would severely damage the credibility of the interpretation. To this end, it is useful to shadow speakers who are expressing strong or even excessive emotion, without fear of drifting into caricature, given that there will always be a filter or some loss of intensity between ‘shadower’ and ‘shadowee’.
The above exercise is of particular utility in the interpreter’s ‘B’ language, as its extended practice helps to instill native accent and provide a more nearly instinctive feeling for register and vocabulary, in sensitive contexts where any such failures would have serious consequences. For accent correction purposes, it is preferable initially to shadow language-learning tapes/CDs, etc., because the texts are spoken slowly, thus all sounds can be easily discerned. In addition, the texts employed are simpler, but grammar and syntax are correct. An added advantage is that the text will be available to read during shadowing.
It is also useful to spend time shadowing fast speakers, as it is true to say that many (usually inexperienced) interpreters have difficulty in simply delivering even their native language rapidly, clearly and without stumbling, especially when obliged to adopt a cadence which is not their own. It goes without saying that this difficulty is exacerbated into the ‘B’ language.
It is my hope that the above hints and descriptions will help you in your interpreting life, and endow you with increased facility and confidence in all your active languages, and in all registers. I should again stress the importance of shadowing, and of spending considerable amounts of time on this exercise, to enable the brain to integrate it in a reflexive, automatic way, clearing the way for more complex intellectual operations while actually interpreting.
Christopher Guichot de Fortis (AIIC)
Senior Staff Interpreter, NATO Headquarters, Bruxelles 20th September 2011
