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However, on the “A front”, I haven’t said very much. True, I’ve given some . But on actual techniques to enhance your mother tongue, I’ve been pretty silent. So let’s change that.

I’ll set the stage by saying that hearing we have to work on our A can be a bit embarrassing. When we’re told to pull up our socks with regard to a B or C, there is less of an emotional impact. Most times, we have learned Bs and Cs as second languages, and we accept fairly easily that we still have more learning to do. Yet an Alanguage is somehow different. We assume that it should naturally be ready for prime time. We believe that we shouldn’t have to put in any kind of special effort. When we’re told our A needs more polish, it can feel like there is something wrong with us. That we are somehow inherently inferior.

(There’s a certain kind of snootiness out there in the interpreting world that doesn’t help. The gossips among us will often say of a colleague they don’t like, “so-and-so is completely alingual.” By this, they mean that the person in question has such a poor command of his A language that it is as though he doesn’t have a mother tongue.)

Let’s get rid of the inferiority complex straightaway. Professional tradesmen and women need to keep all their tools sharp. And so it is with interpreters, too. So let’s kick the emotional baggage to the curb and see what concrete strategies we can use to bring our A language to the cutting edge.

1. Read, read, and read some more

Okay, so this piece of advice is a bit of a cop out on my part. I’ve given it before, and it likely strikes anyone reading this as fairly obvious. I won’t belabour the point. However, I will just underscore two things. First, you need to read quality sources in your A. This means your reading material must be well written. Oh, and it would help if it were the same sources your clients are using, too. For English As, is great for an international angle, and gives a Canadian point of view. For French As, covers news from around the world, and has the latest from closer to home. Second, you have to read ACTIVELY. Don’t just skim through articles on your way to school. Instead, jot down interesting vocabulary and turns of phrase in a notebook, and review the contents of the notebook from time to time.

Don’t worry too much if you find this to be a tough slog at first. I was in my early 20s the first time I subscribed to The Economist. I remember that the (then paper) magazines used to pile up, unread, on the floor. It took me so long to read the articles, because I didn’t understand their content, that the next one would arrive before I had finished with the first. And so on, and so on. This is natural. In fact, it’s part of the transition between youth and full-blown intellectual adulthood. You need to move yourself from a world solely populated with family, friends, and popular culture to one where the concerns of political and economic decision-makers take centre stage. And you will, over time.

2. Imitate formal speeches

Would you know how to stand up in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations and give a speech on ocean acidification? Or in front of a recipient country of the International Monetary Fund to speak about quantitative easing? Chances are good that you answered “no”. If you can’t give this kind of speech, what makes you think you can interpret it?

To do our jobs well, we have to know how to create and deliver formal speeches, the kind that are delivered before some of the most august bodies on the planet. Generally, students come to the MCI without this kind of know-how, so they need to develop it. How do you do that? One way is to take a look at some good models. On the Internet, you can easily find both texts and videos of speeches given by political leaders. Here are a few good sources.

• Soon-to-be former President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso ( and )
• Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon ()
• Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, and other IMF employees, too ( and )
• The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper ( and )
• The President of France, François Hollande ( and )
• The Premier of Quebec, Philippe Couillard ()

The goal for you is to read, recite, and even memorize examples of formal speeches until you understand them as a kind of genre. In other words, you should be able to recognize their constituent parts and to have automatic strategies for coping with them. For example, have you have noticed the way an address begins by naming — in order of their importance — the categories of people who are in the audience? A speech at the UN General Assembly starts at the top, and works its way down: “Mr. President (of the Assembly), Mr. Secretary-General (of the UN), heads of state and government, delegates, ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen…” You should be able to rhyme this off by heart when prompted, and you should be equally familiar with how to handle introductions, conclusions, and the other components of a speech.

3. Write, and not just about yourself

I know that I have decent resources in my A language. I may have plenty of other shortcomings as an interpreter, but knowledge of my mother tongue is not normally one of them. When I reflect on how this came to be, I can honestly say that writing did a lot for me. I am lucky enough to have completed a PhD, and I have tried to publish my research on a regular basis (John Benjamins Publishing Company site, in the TTR journal (2004), and in the TTR journal (2005).) In short, as a researcher, I have been required to write formal texts. These texts have then been subject to peer review (a rigorous quality assurance process) before being published. The whole experience has forced me to learn how to express my ideas using the vocabulary and structures expected by specialists. I wasn’t very good at it when I started, but it got easier over time.

Now, I’m not suggesting that interpreting students need to become researchers in order to strengthen their command over their A. Instead, I’m merely trying to stress how formal writing can do a lot to take your mother tongue to the next level. The trick here is to make the same transition from youth to adulthood that I mentioned above. When we are young, the kind of writing we do in school is focused on ourselves. We write about our thoughts and our feelings, and about how we see ourselves fitting into our peer group or the world narrowly defined. As adults, we need to use writing to do something different. Instead of being subject-focused, the text we write needs to become object-focused. In other words, we need to take the emphasis off ourselves and place it on a topic that is outside of us.

When exactly would the average interpreting student have an opportunity to do that? I’ll admit, not too often. But one option might be to keep a progress journal, a place where you track your development as an interpreter. Many of our instructors require students to do just this, for example, by setting weeklygoals, (“I will devote three hours a day outside class to my interpreting practice; during that time, I will doa minimum of two consecutive and two simultaneous speeches, taking care to focus on instinct inhibitionand analysis”) that are measurable (“At the end of 12 weeks, I will be able to interpret a ten-minute speechconsecutively”). Try as much as possible to write objectively. Look at your development as a kind of scientific specimen that you are studying under a microscope, and write about your progress in those terms.

4. Try to navigate the Atlantic (or Pacific, orArabian, or…) divide

All of the working languages of the MCI are spoken in many places. And they are spoken in many ways. The most obvious example of this is the Atlantic divide — the fact that the four languages of the Americas(English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish) are used differently in the New World than they are in Europe. But of course, other languages face the same problem. Arabic speakers often complain that they can’t understand one another because their language is spoken so differently from place to place. One Taiwanese student of mine remarked that he had trouble following Mandarin speakers from mainland China because “they frame their ideas in ways I don’t understand”.

This last example alludes to an important point. The differences I’m talking about are not just in vocabulary (British “to do the washing up” versus North American “to do the dishes”; Hexagonal “uninterprète freelance, indépendant ” vs. Québécois “ un interprète pigiste “), but in the way people express their ideas, and even in the way they structure a speech as a whole. In this speech by at the outset of 2013, she wishes the people gathered to hear her in the legislative assembly of Côte d’Ivoire a happy new year, saying,

Les voeux, on les adresse toujours, bien sûr, avec chaleur. Ce sont toujours des voeux de bonheur.Sachez que les miens sont véritablement sincères et pleins d’espoir.

(Wishes, we address them always, of course, with warmth. They are always wishes for happiness.Know that mine are truly sincere and full of hope.)

Lagarde is an eloquent — and very formal — speaker. She is truly a joy to listen to in French (and also in English, for that matter). But she formulates her sentences in a way that marks her as an educated European. In North America, we tend to believe that simpler is better, and we would be more likely to say something like this: “Let me wish you all the best for a happy new year. In saying this, I’m both sincere and full of hope.”

The point here is that we have to be ready for people to use our language in ways that are not ours. We have to make ourselves familiar with different varieties of our language, and we have to be ready to meet people halfway. So if you are a hispanophone who struggles with expressions from Spain, or if you are a French-speaker from Paris who cringes at the sound of Québécois, guess what? You have work to do…

In sum, the message that I am trying to pass on is this. Despite what you may think, mastery of your Alanguage is not a given. It is not automatic. It needs to be cultivated actively in order to reach the heights required for conference interpreting. There is no shame in this. We all have to follow a learning curve in this regard, even if some interpreters out there try to claim that they came into this world with their mother tongue resources fully formed. So get smart, and get active. Hone your tools, and make them sharp. Use the strategies listed above to take your A language to the cutting edge.