Meet the German Interpreters!

At Fall Forum 2014 you can experience three contributions in German and their interpretation into English.

(Isabel Frey, Hannes Schauer, Yiray Wu)

Isabel is a non-graduate student on an exchange semester. Her C language is Spanish. She will finish her Master’s degree in Conference Interpreting at the University of Heidelberg next year.

Hannes is an advanced entry student. After graduating from MIIS in May 2015, he will finish the last year of his second Interpretation degree at the University of Leipzig. His C language is Spanish as well.

Yiray is from Taiwan. Her A language is Chinese. She started learning German in high-school and added it as her C language at MIIS. She studied as an exchange student at the University of Tübingen and at the SDI in Munich.

German: Flexible strings attached

While German is notorious for its seemingly endless compound nouns, they don’t pose too much of a hassle for interpreters.

What can become troublesome though, is the flexible nature of German sentences. Speakers can construct sentences, where essential information pops up at the very end. After listening for half a minute, the whole contend might be negated at the end by a little, sneaky “nicht”. Or imagine having only a misleading part of a verb at the beginning, while an important particle went on a journey right to the end of the whole sentence:

Imagine not being able to trust a single verb until you get to the end! A nightmare during simultaneous interpretation.