If you are going to speak during the Conference, here are a few tips to keep in mind.
This list was made by interpreters to help them do their job, but always keep in mind that they will also be extremely helpful for all the participants who might not be as comfortable as you are with English.
When making a speech or intervening during a session
- Speak slowly and clearly
- As much as possible, make short sentences. Subject – Verb – Complement. Don’t hesitate to repeat a verb in different sentences, this makes your speech easier to process.
- Avoid acronyms. “WOSM”, “NSO”, “TP” are all acronyms we are very familiar with from our document. But they are more difficult to process orally than written. In the case of artificial intelligence subtitling, which will be used for some sessions, it might be caught completely wrong.
- When you mention a name, always accompany it with a word that defines it: “mister…”, “miss…”, “my friend…”, “minister…”, “President…”, etc. This helps people and artificial intelligence to process the information that the following word is a noun and they should not try to “make sense of it”.
- If you are quoting something (be it from a book, a famous author or a sentence from a document or a resolution):
- Say that you will quote from that document
- Take a break of a couple of seconds
- Read or say the quote clearly and very slowly (in writing, we tend to be more concise and condensed than orally, so when reading out loud, we need to go slower to compensate)
- Take a break of a couple second after before resuming your intervention
- Don’t hesitate to pause. A pause will always feel a lot longer to you that it really is, so don’t be afraid of a silence that you think is lasting too long – it is not.
When having informal discussions
- Speak slowly and clearly
- After each idea, ask if everybody understood well – make eye contact when you ask and give them time to answer: they might need time to process your idea and realise that they did not understand something
- If you have someone who can act as an interpreter between you and the people who don’t speak English, don’t hesitate to ask them. If you do so, remember to shorten your sentence as much as possible to facilitate their work.
- If there is no other option, don’t hesitate to take out your phone and use automatic translation. If you use automatic translation:
- Shorten and cut your sentences as much as possible.
- don’t hesitate to speak in your own mother tongue.
- We always advise to avoid difficult words : this is not valid for automatic translation, it is better to use one difficult word instead of many simple words to express the same idea, as it will shorten your sentence.
- Use your body language and your body: you can point, mime, anything that helps convey your message
Bad speaking habits to avoid
- Reading a speech without looking up
- Use filler words between sentences: “Huumm”, “heeee”, “like”, “so”
- Speaking with no pause
- Moving the hands too much
- Not moving at all
- No intonations
- Put intonations in the wrong places (for example raising at the end of all sentences)
- Use too many acronyms
- Make long sentences with many sub-clauses