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FEATURES Pooling resources Sophie Llewellyn Smith looks at an experiment that is using crowdsourcing to aid interpreter training To fuel the demand for interpreting services, institutions around the world train hundreds of students every year. These trainee interpreters learn by doing. From day one, they listen to short speeches and render them in another language; later they practise note-taking and simultaneous technique. To do this, they need a source of short, structured, well-argued, welldelivered speeches containing enough challenges to help them master new skills, but not so many as to make the task impossible. You might think that, in the absence of a willing 'live' speaker, interpreters need look no further than the internet for suitable video clips. Surprisingly, this isn't the case. Various speech banks and repositories have been developed, but they all have cons as well as pros. Some are short-lived, with limited language coverage and audio files only. Others are vast libraries of political speeches, which may contain useful material for experienced interpreters, but are not easily searchable and tend to be unsuitable for beginners. Others are popular but do not permit universal access, are costly or have a slow turnover. This is where a new, dynamic website called Speechpool comes in (www.speechpool.net). It arose as a logical extension of what my conference interpreting students at the University of Leeds were doing – namely, recording speeches and sharing the audio files. It occurred to me that students the world over were probably doing likewise. If we could only pool all that knowledge and expertise, we could create a vast repository of practice material in dozens of languages. It soon became apparent that the resource had much wider applications. It could be used by conference interpreters adding a new Vol/52 No/3 2013 SHARING MATERIAL: Sophie Llewellyn Smith delivers a speech for Speechpool language, practising for a test or developing a 'retour'; by public service interpreters, sign language interpreters, interpreter trainers seeking classroom material and even language learners. I was fortunate to obtain financial support from the National Network for Interpreting (NNI) and started working on the project in summer 2012 with web developer Matt Clarke, also based at Leeds. Speechpool draws on modern technologies and crowdsourcing concepts to create a truly collaborative resource. The site will only remain dynamic, relevant and useful if users join in; the people who watch the video clips are also content generators and can upload suitable speeches. The Facebook generation is used to an interactive online experience, so we have built in some fun features. You can leave comments about the speeches, add a link to your own interpretation and ask for feedback, send a Quality Alert email in case of technical problems, and vote on how difficult a speech was. Posting on the dedicated Facebook page allows Speechpoolers to ask, say, for a speech in Greek about the recession. Since its launch two months ago, the site has attracted more than 1,500 members, with more joining every day. We have many regular visitors, who are viewing clips and leaving comments – but not uploading speeches yet. We still have some way to go in breaking through that barrier to ensure a good turnover of material on the site. Part of the reason for this reluctance may be that people see it as a time-consuming chore, but it actually doesn't take long. More importantly, preparing speeches is a very valuable exercise in itself for trainee interpreters, as it hones their analytical skills and public speaking, as well as activating useful vocabulary. The site is currently running in English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Japanese and Hungarian, thanks to a team of volunteer translators. We expect to add Spanish very shortly and have a dozen more language versions in the pipeline. We hope eventually to have a version of Speechpool in every EU language, plus Arabic, Russian and many others. Chinese is a particular challenge because of the Great Firewall, which prevents access to YouTube in China (our video clips are hosted on YouTube), but we are working on a solution to meet the obvious demand. I see Speechpool not just as a useful tool for practising interpreting, but also as a way of bringing together the often divided strands of the global interpreting community. All this takes time and money, and we are currently applying for EU funding so that we can keep expanding Speechpool next year. TL Sophie Llewellyn Smith is a staff interpreter at the European Commission. JUNE/JULY The Linguist 23