The tech for practicing consec

Consecutive interpreting is often seen as decidedly low-tech or even no-tech. And that is part of its appeal: at its core, you still need little more than a speaker, a pen, and a notebook. But technology can make it much easier to build a symbol system, find good practice material, record yourself, and review your performance deliberately. So if you want to brush up on your consec skills, here are some tech-infused tips to get you started.

Get inspired by this online symbol collection

Interpreters love to compare notes. Literally. “Do you have a symbol for X?” or “What do you use for Y?” are frequent questions when interpreters talk shop. In the past, you would have had to rely on those informal exchanges with colleagues or classic manuals like Rozan’s or Matyssek’s. In the internet age, however, inspiration is just a click away.

Enter Symbol Tree (Symbolovník). This searchable online collection of interpreting symbols is still available and remains a handy source of ideas. Type in a search term and browse symbols, related concepts, and visual shorthand you can adapt to your own system. The goal is not to copy someone else’s notes wholesale, of course, but to give yourself a starting point when you are stuck for a compact visual representation.

Organize and memorize with visual flash cards

Language lovers have relied on flash cards for ages. Language A on one side, language B on the other: it’s simple, and it works. Today, established tools such as Quizlet and Anki make it easy to build collections and review them with spaced repetition.

But have you ever considered using flash cards to organize and memorize your consec symbols? If you use Apple devices, Kyoku Flashcards still lets you draw or write directly on both sides of a card with Apple Pencil and study the results using a Leitner-style spaced-repetition system. Anki is another strong option, especially if you want a more powerful cross-platform study system. Its built-in Image Occlusion feature lets you turn a photographed or scanned symbol sheet into cards by hiding selected areas.

Drawing the symbol yourself can also reinforce the visual and motor memory you rely on in real note-taking. Build your collection gradually, keep the symbols that feel natural to you, and use spaced repetition to make the useful ones automatic.

Record your interpreting for deliberate practice

One advantage of consecutive is that you still don’t need much equipment to practice it. Start with a good speech source. The European Commission’s Speech Repository remains one of the best options and now offers thousands of practice speeches organized by language, difficulty, interpreting mode, and subject. The Commission also maintains an Interpretation Training Toolbox with links to additional training resources.

One old recommendation from this article has not aged as well: Speechpool is no longer actively maintained, so we would not rely on it as a current source of new practice material.

Once you have a speech, add one small helper: your phone, tablet, or computer microphone. Whenever you deliver a practice interpretation, record a few minutes or the whole thing. Later, listen back and identify both areas to improve and things that worked well. Over time, those recordings give you an acoustic timeline of your progress.

You can now take that review loop much further with automatic transcription. OneNote for Microsoft 365 on Windows can record or import audio, generate a transcript, and synchronize your handwritten ink with the recording. That means you can review what the speaker said, what you wrote down, and what happened at each moment in the audio.

Notability has also evolved well beyond basic note-taking and audio recording. It can synchronize handwriting with audio playback, transcribe recordings, make handwritten notes searchable, and—depending on the current plan and platform—offer live transcription and AI-assisted study features. This makes it possible to keep your source speech, notes, recording, and transcript in one practice workspace.

And if you want to take things up another notch, use the transcript as a review aid. You can compare the source with your interpretation, mark omissions or additions, note terminology problems, and rewrite awkward turns of phrase. A general-purpose AI assistant can help you spot patterns or suggest alternatives, but treat that as a second opinion: interpreting quality still requires your own judgment, and ideally feedback from a trainer or colleague.

The result is a much richer deliberate-practice loop than we had when this article was first written: practice speech → handwritten notes → recorded interpretation → transcript → analysis → targeted review. The technology stays in the background; the interpreting skill remains the point.

This column was first published in the 312th edition (February 2021) of the Tool Box Journal and revised in August 2026.

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