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In this article we will present the qualities that a good interpreter should have:

1. Mental agility: You need to be able to do more things at once: to listen, to understand, to synthesize, to translate, to communicate.

2. Retention capacity: One of the biggest problems: to hold more ideas, while one of the interlocutors speaks, so you can translate them into another language.

3. Synthesis capacity: Form drafts with ideas in your mind, order these ideas, which will help you translate later.

4. Ability to stay focused: Be very careful. If you lose the thread of speech or conversation for a moment, it is very possible to lose the main idea and to be impossible to understand.

5. Impartiality: Put yourself in the place of the interlocutor and communicate his message, irrespective of the political profession or tendency.

6. Mastering the mother tongue: It is necessary to master your mother tongue. It will be impossible to pretend that you know one or two languages ​​if you do not master your own language. Read books, newspapers, and magazines that will help you develop your vocabulary and the necessary structures.

7. A good knowledge of the working language(s): Just as in the previous paragraph, it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the working languages to be able to accurately interpret and highlight the necessary nuances in the expressions to be translated.

8. A rich general culture and knowledge of national and international headlines: To talk, to communicate, you need to understand what is being said. Without a rich general culture, without a knowledge of what is happening inside and outside our borders, it will be impossible to maintain a correct communication.

In the case of commercial interpretation, for a good discussion, a prior study of the commercial field, company specific activity, products or topics to be discussed is required. Therefore, whenever possible, you need to ask the company for information about the topics to be discussed during the interpretation.

9. Intellectual curiosity: The desire to know a little of all. You will not always interpret from/in the areas you like. Sometimes there are moments when you have to provide interpretation services on unfamiliar or uninteresting topics.

If you want to find out about the qualities of a good translator, check out our article on this topic: What are the qualities of a good translator?

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