Blogging Translator

Engaging with your speakers when you’re doing a presentation

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at the University of Westminster as part of a National Network for Translation Careers in Languages Day. Some readers may not already know about this important body, a UK government initiative, and if you don’t I urge you to read about it on the website. Various events are organised as part of this initiative – my hot picks are  ‘How work-ready are graduates of translation programmes?‘, and then in November the conference ‘The Translator as Expert Writer‘ at the University of Portsmouth. Another feature of the network’s website is the posting of details of work placements.

The audience I was speaking to at this particular event mainly consisted of A-level students and undergraduate students, who for one reason or another had the drive and determination (or sheer craziness) to drag themselves up to the utter madness that is Oxford Circus early on a Saturday morning to listen to the likes of me tell them why they should most definitely consider a career in translation.

Now that I’m about 5 years into my translation career, the time when working as a translator was still a distant dot on the horizon is starting to get harder to remember, so when I sat down to plan my presentation I found it surprisingly hard to know where to start. It should be the easiest thing in the world just to tell them what I do, how I do it, and how I got to do it, right? As it turns out, for me, putting myself in their shoes was not as easy as I thought, and I realised that my first draft was really aimed at postgraduate students of translation or translation colleagues, not someone who was just at the very start of things.

Although when planning a presentation it may be difficult to identify with an audience that is approaching it from a totally different mindset to you, it is vital that you make efforts to identify and engage with them. In my case, this was not only beneficial as as part of a reflective activity,  as a way of making me assess my own progress by thinking back to the past, but also because as a professional working in your own little world everyday it is healthy to peel yourself out of that every now and then in order to situate yourself within a wider context. Heck, this could almost be a sanity-saving measure!

When doing presentations of any kind, before you even start drafting your pearls of wisdom, take some time to think about how this wisdom will be best received by your audience. If you believe in what you are saying, how are you going to encourage them to believe in it too without boring them into submission? We’ve all sat through self-important PowerPoint presentations delivered in a dry, overly speaker-focused way, with slides that read like they were the pages of books in another life. It doesn’t have to be that way. Giving a presentation is not exactly the same as teaching a language, but the basic approach should be similar.

Here are some tips I picked up today from a post by Chris Brogan:

• Ask your audience a question that frames the speech.
• Tell your audience how you’ll try and answer that question.
• Start with a personal or investigatory story.
• Drill down into the details of how the story applies to your presentation.
• Offer some takeaways or next-actions for this.
• Tell another personal or informational story.
• Repeat the drill down points, the takeaways, etc.
• Thread questions in earlier than the end.
• Finish with a solid set of steps people can use to take action based on your presentation.