St Ebbe's Oxford - simultaneous interpreting into Ukrainian using tour guide style headsets

This past Sunday I attended a morning service at St Ebbe's Church in Oxford. The service was excellent, including hearty singing and also a very good preached message on Philippians 1:27-2:4 by Vaughan Roberts, who was already preaching at the CICCU Saturday Bible reading way back in 1994 when I was an undergraduate student. 

Anyway, about halfway through the sermon I could hear that there was someone interpreting the service into a foreign language. I then noticed that next to the sound desk there was someone seated on a raised stool and with a headset and microphone. After the service I went over and found out that she was interpreting into Ukrainian. She kindly answered various questions I put to her. 

I am hoping that maybe this will materialise into a blog in which the interpreter can share her experience. However, in the meantime, let me share some points which may be useful. 

The interpreter was seated slightly away from other worshippers and with a clear line of sight to the preacher. This is a very good arrangement. 

The technology for delivering the interpreting was a tourist microphone and set of headsets as used by tour guides in places such as Oxford. This means that those receiving interpreting can be seated throughout the building. 

The interpreter was given a full script of the service including songs and set prayers, however she is not currently being given any notes on the sermon. Best practice would be to at least give some sort of steer as to what will be said and any key points or difficult bits to translate. The speaker said that "believing in Christ" and "suffering for Christ" come "as a package". I think this would have been difficult for an interpreter to render "on the spot", however with some time and thought, you could come up with something that might work as a translation of that phrase. 

Towards the start of the sermon, the preacher connected well with the audience by making some observations about light and how it gets dark in the winter (the clocks had just gone back that morning). This led to some amusing comments about different tastes in respect of lighting in the house, which made people laugh, but which might have been difficult to transpose for a non native English audience. As has been highlighted previously, humour and laughter is quite difficult to manage and can leave the non native speaker of English "left out" or even potentially feeling they might be the one being laughed at. 

Another useful tool can be some sort of glossary of key terms and phrases that are used in preaching, as these can, in some cases, be difficult to render well, or potentially misleading. One example would be the phrase, "Can I challenge you to do X?" which means something along the lines of, "I want to exhort you to do X." Other examples might be more theological, such as the word "conversion".