Who is Speechpool for ?
If you want to practise your interpreting skills, work on a new language to enhance your combination, or give something back to the interpreting community by contributing speeches, you have come to the right place.
And if you are not an interpreter and you just want to listen to interesting speeches to improve your listening comprehension and general knowledge, you are very welcome here too.
Speechpool is intended as a place where interpreting students, graduates, and practising interpreters can pool their knowledge and expertise and give each other a helping hand. Please get involved in this experiment in collaboration!
Take the plunge !
Most pages on the site allow you to search for a speech using the Search box and drop-down menu on the right of the page. Enter the keywords you are interested in, for example 'Ireland, agriculture, figures, fast'. Leave the drop-down menu set to 'All' to search through all the speeches on the site, or select a topic to narrow down your search.
When the list of speeches appears, you can choose one based on the star rating, which represents perceived difficulty, or based on how recent or how popular the speech is.
When you have finished viewing the speech, don't forget to vote on how difficult you found it! You can also leave comments about the speech. If you're extra-keen, you could upload your interpretation to Youtube and leave the link in the comments section, so others can watch your efforts and offer feedback!
Star rating
Here's your chance to express an opinion: was the speech a walk in the park? Tricky, but feasible? Hellish? Vote!
The number of stars reflects the perceived difficulty of the speech, as voted by users. One star is easy, for some people at least... Five stars is fiendishly difficult.
* dip your toes in the water
** treading water
*** going swimmingly
**** in at the deep end
***** sink or swim
Join in !
If you would like to upload a speech, here's what to do:
- Contact us to obtain login details. Speeches can be uploaded by interpreting students, alumni of interpreting courses, and practising interpreters.
- Prepare a speech and record yourself using a video camera, webcam or mobile phone. What kind of speech? The kind you've been trained to produce, of course: 4 - 12 minutes long or so, well structured, and delivered in a natural manner. Whether it is easy or difficult, philosophical or full of facts and figures, slow or fast, topical or historical, is up to you. You may want to keep your fellow students' boredom threshold and sanity in mind, though... interesting, topical, doable speeches containing personal opinions are always appreciated.
- Upload your speech to Youtube. You will need your own account. This is easy to do, honest! You can adjust the privacy settings to make your speech 'unlisted' rather than 'public'. This way, it will only be visible to people with whom you share the link, and not to the general public. Please don't adjust the settings to 'private' or you will not be able to add your speech to the Speechpool site. Once you have uploaded the video to youtube copy the video code. The video code can be found in the URL. For example, if the URL is "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPF-iNmbxC8" you would need to copy the code "dPF-iNmbxC8."
- Click on the page called 'Upload a speech' on the Speechpool website. Enter the information in the relevant fields (title of your speech, topic, whether it's suitable for consecutive or simultaneous).
- Enter the video url in the appropriate field.
- Fill in the keyword box. This will help other users search for your speech, so make it quite detailed if you can. You can include keywords relating to content ('renewable energies', 'taxation', 'feminism') or to the speech's characteristics ('difficult', 'long', 'Cypriot accent', 'figures').
- There is a box for useful information such as personal comments ('this speech is factually incorrect', 'this speech was recorded just before the Presidential elections in the US') or a link to a glossary, if you're feeling magnanimous.
- Finally, fill in the 'links to source material' box with... links to your source material! These might be news websites, specialised websites, blogs... Try to choose links that won't go out of date too quickly.
- Please respect copyright when preparing your speeches. Simply reading out someone else's speech, even a brilliant speech by a politician, or using large chunks of another author's text, even if it's in a newspaper article, is a breach of copyright and the spirit of Speechpool.