Recently, I have been looking for more ways to practice interpreting Japanese into English. But it is harder than you might think to find good resources. Even though there is a wealth of Japanese material out there, it is hard to find any that fits the general guidelines for good interpreting practice material.
What makes a good interpreting practice resource
Drawing from several different sources (see below), I have come to the conclusion that J>E practice material should be the following:
- 3-5 minutes in length
- with one speaker
- on a topic of a general nature (narrative, argument, explanation, etc)
- with clear audio (not muffled or recorded in a noisy environment)
- with a transcript (for checking meaning)
- with an English translation (when possible)
Obviously, these are ideal conditions for a beginner practice session. Once you have gotten used to these, you can move on to longer resources, with more than one speaker, on a more specialized topic. But if you want to be successful in practicing, I recommend you start easy and progress to more difficult. You may find it harder than you think at first.
Recommended Resources?
Given these conditions, I have only found three good resources. I explained one in the last post: Japanese to English Speech Interpreting Practice.
The second one is NHK Easy News. The benefit to these short news casts is that the audio is slow, but still natural paced, and there is a transcript. There is no English translation, but because the vocabulary has been simplified, it should be easy enough to understand. Also, they are short so it makes great quick practice.
The third is FluentU. With this site, you can access videos in Japanese (or several other languages) which have been transcribed and have vocabulary lists pre-generated. However, they do not allow you control over how you print the transcript. It automatically prints in a huge font with furigana. This means that it takes up several pages, making it difficult to use for something like sight translation. Also, the video topics vary a lot so you have to be choosy.
Resources:
Conference Interpreting: A Student’s Practice Book by Andrew Gillies
同時通訳者の英語ノート術＆学習法 by 工藤 紘実
はじめてのウィスパリング同時通訳 by 柴田バネッサ清美
Becoming a Translator 