Confidence for
Interpreters

About the workshop

Confidence is about understanding your strengths and your weaknesses as an interpreter and knowing how to improve your strengths.

Join us on Saturday, 17 October at 12:00 Brussels time for an interactive workshop on confidence for interpreters.

Programme

• A framework for confidence — Understanding where booth confidence comes from across your A, B, and C languages.
• Sounding confident: mastering falling intonation — Vocal delivery, pitch control, and sentence endings that project calm authority.
• Exercises to evaluate own performance — How to assess your output objectively after each assignment without spiralling into harsh self-critique.
• Strategies to build a personal improvement plan that works — Structuring deliberate practice routines that deliver measurable progress without burnout.
• Discussion — An open exchange with colleagues to share booth challenges, questions, and working solutions.

What we will cover

1. Confidence in your A, B, and C languages. Navigating the distinct psychological traps and linguistic demands of interpreting into your mother tongue versus an active or passive language.
2. How to feel confident before an assignment. Adequate preparation without obsessive over-research. Grounding techniques to tame pre-interpretation jitters before you step into the room.
3. What to do in the booth. Managing lag, vocal control under adrenaline, and recovering smoothly when you drop a figure or miss a term.
4. Sounding confident when interpreting: mastering the falling intonation. Why questioning, rising sentence endings broadcast hesitation to listeners — and practical exercises to anchor authoritative, decisive falling intonation.
5. How to evaluate performance after each assignment. A structured routine to debrief your work factually, isolating real technical errors from subjective self-doubt.
6. Know what you're good at and what you're bad at. Accurate self-diagnosis is the baseline. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at honestly.
7. A plan to fix what you're bad at. Targeted micro-drills to address specific weak spots rather than generic, unfocused practice.
8. How to build systems that help you improve without burning out. Small, sustainable habits that fit into a busy working interpreter's life and compound over months.
9. Patience and self-compassion. Giving yourself permission to develop gradually. Self-flagellation only creates tension; calm creates fluency.
10. How to fall in love with your own interpretation. Moving from cringing at your recordings to taking genuine pride and pleasure in your delivery, style, and craft.
11. BONUS: A worksheet to evaluate and improve performance. A practical takeaway template you can use after every assignment to audit and track your progress systematically.

Who is this for?

Simultaneous and consecutive interpreters who want to feel grounded in the booth, stop second-guessing their delivery, and replace self-doubt with a clear, systematic plan for professional growth.

Workshop details

Donation-based

This is a donation-based workshop. If you enjoy it, I ask that you thank me financially or leave me a public review on LinkedIn.

Who's teaching?

Mykhailo 'Meesh' Khokhlovych

Bilingual simultaneous interpreter · English / Ukrainian / Russian

Meesh has over 10 years of interpreting experience and 15 years of language teaching. He brings both the craft and the pedagogy together in a session that is as rigorous as it is practical.

BA Linguistics — University College Utrecht, 2016 Cambridge CELTA, 2012 Cambridge DELTA, 2021