Interpreting from Dutch (L1) into Spanish (L4) - Pedagogical Proposals

Abstract

Worldwide, there are many different contexts where interpreters have to work from or into a language that is an L2, L3 or even an L4 to them. Interpreting schools therefore face the challenge of preparing their students to perform well in such situations. Every day, however, interpreting trainers observe their students’ uncertainties, errors, interferences and avoidance strategies. This article presents a teaching method that has been developed in the Dutch (L1)-Spanish (L4) bi-active classes in the Master in Interpreting at Ghent University. Its key ideas are: creating semantic and grammatical networks and linguistic back-and-forth work to consolidate during training the knowledge acquired during the preparatory stage, and enhancing general linguistic «availability». The method we present can be used for any language pair, although each language pair needs to address its own problems.