This course develops simultaneous interpreting from French into Greek for fourth-year students, working in the interpreting booth. It combines conceptual and terminological preparation; analysis of speech delivered in French, including the speaker's positions and implicit meanings; management of density and time lag (décalage); and idiomatic reformulation of the message in Greek. Thirteen thematic units on politics, culture, and international cooperation serve as learning situations, while public service interpreting is also examined with regard to the choice of interpreting mode. Training aims at the acquisition of core skills through guided exercises, interpreting assignment scenarios, teamwork both inside and outside the booth (whispered interpreting), and simulations of professional settings where simultaneous is the preferred or the only possible mode (conferences, courts, etc.).

Learning Objectives

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Distinguish the specific demands of simultaneous as opposed to consecutive interpreting and make well-grounded choices of the appropriate interpreting mode, particularly in public service settings.
• Analyze spoken discourse delivered in French, identifying the main position, the actors involved, logical relations, modality, and the attribution of positions, and distinguish well-founded implicit meaning from ambiguity and personal assumption.
• Interpret simultaneously into Greek prepared French speeches of five to seven minutes, delivered at a moderate pace and with controlled density, preserving the line of reasoning, the speaker's positions, and critical information.
• Segment the speech, regulate the time lag (décalage), and condense verbal redundancies so as to retain the primary information and recover after a difficulty without inventing content.
• Reformulate the message in idiomatic, cohesive, clear, and fluent Greek tailored to the audience, restructuring French sentences and references without calques that obscure meaning and without unjustified additions or omissions.
• Preserve the speaker's commitments and reservations and the attribution of what is said, and justify the choice of interpreting mode and the limits of their professional remit in the public service cases studied.
• Compile an assignment file and documented French–Greek glossaries, distinguishing related concepts and selecting Greek terminological equivalents appropriate to the context, verified against official sources.
• Check booth equipment, make selective use of documents and visual aids, provide silent support to their boothmate, carry out handovers correctly, and signal technical problems in accordance with international conference interpreting protocols.
• Work both in teams and independently, organizing their preparation for an interpreting assignment in an institutional setting and managing the requirements of each assignment.
• Identify comprehension and processing difficulties using time-stamped evidence, compare a first rendition, a repeat, and a new excerpt, and revise their practice plan accordingly.
• Make critical use of approved digital preparation and practice environments, checking the reliability of outputs and complying with the course policy on the use of artificial intelligence.

Content (Syllabus)

Week 1 – Multilingual Democracy and Citizen Participation

Skills: Familiarization with the interpreting booth and equipment (channel, microphone, cough button) and diagnostic recording of needs in understanding French speech and reformulating its meaning in Greek. Identifying the main position and the connectives in a well-structured French speech. Intralingual paraphrasing of a Greek message and simultaneous interpreting of 60–90-second French segments with pedagogical pauses, with an understanding of the difference between reformulation and mechanical repetition.

Week 2 – European Institutions and Decision-Making

Skills: Clarifying the institutional roles of speakers (Commission, Parliament, Council of the EU, European Council, UN, etc.) at the European and international levels, and reformulating in Greek the relationships among actors, decisions, and procedures. Tracking pronoun references, segmenting long stretches of speech, and regulating time lag: when to wait for a piece of information and when to close the Greek sentence. Compiling documented glossary entries and abbreviations.

Week 3 – Culture and Cultural Heritage in the French–Greek Dialogue

Skills: Interpreting the pragmatic and culture-specific elements of cultural discourse delivered in French and choosing idiomatic Greek renderings for metaphors, cultural assumptions, historical particularities, and cultural heritage names (place names and historical figures and events). Distinguishing information essential to an argument from secondary information, and choosing among an established equivalent, a paraphrase, or a brief clarification, depending on the audience. Preparing proper names in advance and maintaining an appropriate register for presentations.

Week 4 – Education, Research, and Student Mobility

Skills: Preserving the argumentative structure (problem, cause, solution) and the modality of French speech on education policy. Distinguishing in Greek between obligation, recommendation, possibility, and reservation, while preserving logical relations and concessions. Comparing alternative Greek segmentations and checking the coherence of the rendition from the listener's perspective.

Week 5 – The Eurozone Economy, Employment, and Social Protection

Skills: Handling French economic data without losing the unit of measurement (type and order of magnitude), the sense unit in which the figures occur, or their place in the argument, distinguishing between increase, decrease, level, and change. Targeted exercises with numbers and units of measurement, and simultaneous interpreting of presentations with moderate numerical density. First practice in providing silent, off-mic support to a boothmate.

Week 6 – Climate, Agriculture, and Food Security

Skills: Prioritizing information in denser French speech and distinguishing essential propositions from redundant wording. Faithful condensation versus harmful omission, and preserving in Greek causal relations, hypotheses, conditions, and scientific caveats. Exercises first with a glossary and then with restricted aids of no more than one page.

Week 7 – Energy, Infrastructure, and Territorial Cohesion

Skills: Integrating analysis, preparation, and processing management into a continuous Greek rendition when names, data, and technical explanations occur together. Midterm test with two new four-minute French speeches on a prepared topic, with an assignment sheet but without the text being made available to trainees. Ungraded feedback workshop and a remedial plan addressing at least two of the difficulties observed in each trainee.

Week 8 – Migration, Asylum, and Humanitarian Action

Skills: Understanding and rendering legal qualifications, statuses, agency mandates, and reported speech in humanitarian dialogue settings, without turning claims and personal views into facts. Simulation of an information meeting with French contributions of about five minutes each. Distinguishing interpreting at public meetings from interpreting in individual interviews, and justifying the choice between simultaneous interpreting with or without equipment (whispered) and consecutive interpreting.

Week 9 – Public Health and Access to Care

Skills: Rendering the critical information in a French message on public health (target population, eligibility conditions, refusal, risks) into Greek adapted to the needs and pragmatic circumstances of a Greek audience. Adapting register without removing caveats or adding advice, and distinguishing linguistic clarification from medical advice. Comparing a meeting with equipment, limited whispered interpreting (chuchotage), and a dialogic medical interview with at least three participants.

Week 10 – Justice, Equality, and Access to Rights

Skills: Preserving in Greek the legal scope, register, and legal meaning of formulations (right, obligation, possibility, reform proposal), and rendering sensitive personal information in keeping with the speaker's tone and intent, without personal commentary from the interpreter. Simulation of a conference with a legal presentation and a brief service-user testimony. Justifying the choice of interpreting mode and signaling the limits of the interpreter's remit.

Week 11 – Digital Governance and Artificial Intelligence

Skills: Selective use of visual aids (slides, texts) without letting them replace active listening to the French speech, especially when the speaker departs from the text to a greater or lesser extent. Coordinating listening, locating information in reference documents, limited note-taking, searching personal glossaries, working with the boothmate, and interpreting into Greek. Comparing performance with and without automatic transcription, spotting errors in names, negations and affirmations, and numbers, and verifying terminology suggestions produced by digital tools.

Week 12 – Diplomacy, the United Nations, and Collective Security

Skills: Rendering diplomatic reservations and commitments, and the attribution of positions as presented in keeping with the conventions of French diplomatic discourse, and managing question-and-answer exchanges at a press conference following a summit meeting. Organizing off-mic support and handover to the boothmate without interrupting the interpretation. Simulation of a hybrid meeting with a sound check, reporting a technical problem, and resuming from an identifiable point without inventing content to cover the interruption.

Week 13 – Mediterranean Cooperation and Maritime Governance: Conference Simulation

Skills: Transferring analysis and processing strategies to the field of maritime cooperation in a bilingual conference simulation that includes an opening session, presentations, and questions. Simultaneous interpreting of French speeches and questions, and taking on off-mic roles (preparation, support, handover). Self-assessment, peer assessment, and an evidence-based review of progress.

Bibliography

In Greek

Ioannidis, A. (2022). Θεωρία και πράξη της διερμηνείας [Theory and practice of interpreting]. Kallipos, Open Academic Editions. https://doi.org/10.57713/kallipos-93

In Other Languages

Bartłomiejczyk, M. (2006). Strategies of simultaneous interpreting and directionality. Interpreting, 8(2), 149–174. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.8.2.03bar

Chang, C.-c., & Wu, M. M.-c. (2025). Structured peer feedback in simultaneous interpreting training. INContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism, 5(2), 134–159. https://doi.org/10.54754/incontext.v5i2.124

Fan, L., Xiong, L., Xiao, W., & Cheung, A. K. F. (2026). Students’ readiness for digital technology and perceptions of GenAI versus teacher feedback in interpreting training. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399X.2026.2657807

Gile, D. (1995). Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training. John Benjamins.

Gile, D. (2009). Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training (Rev. ed.). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.8

Gillies, A. (2013). Conference interpreting: A student’s practice book. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Conference-Interpreting-A-Students-Practice-Book/Gillies/p/book/9780415532365

Hansen-Schirra, S., Czulo, O., & Hofmann, S. (Eds.). (2017). Empirical modelling of translation and interpreting. Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1089335

International Organization for Standardization. (2019). Interpreting services — Legal interpreting — Requirements (ISO Standard No. 20228:2019). https://www.iso.org/standard/67327.html

International Organization for Standardization. (2020). Interpreting services — Healthcare interpreting — Requirements and recommendations (ISO Standard No. 21998:2020). https://www.iso.org/standard/72344.html

International Organization for Standardization. (2022). Interpreting services — Conference interpreting — Requirements and recommendations (ISO Standard No. 23155:2022). https://www.iso.org/standard/74749.html

International Organization for Standardization. (2024). Interpreting services — Community interpreting — Requirements and recommendations (ISO Standard No. 13611:2024). https://www.iso.org/standard/82387.html

Jones, R. (2002). Conference interpreting explained (2nd ed.). St. Jerome Publishing.

Li, T., & Chmiel, A. (2024). Automatic subtitles increase accuracy and decrease cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting. Interpreting, 26(2), 253–281. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00111.li

Pöchhacker, F. (2022). Introducing interpreting studies (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003186472

Pym, A., Shlesinger, M., & Jettmarová, Z. (Eds.). (2006). Sociocultural aspects of translating and interpreting. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.67

Seeber, K. G. (2011). Cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting: Existing theories — new models. Interpreting, 13(2), 176–204. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.13.2.02see

Seleskovitch, D., & Lederer, M. (2002). Pédagogie raisonnée de l’interprétation (2e éd.). Didier Érudition; Office des publications officielles des Communautés européennes.

Setton, R., & Dawrant, A. (2016a). Conference interpreting: A complete course. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.120

Setton, R., & Dawrant, A. (2016b). Conference interpreting: A trainer’s guide. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.121

Souza, I. E. T. de V., & Fragkou, E. (Eds.). (2020). Handbook of research on medical interpreting. IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-9308-9

Wadensjö, C. (1998). Interpreting as interaction. Longman.

Woo, K. (2025). Analysis of student interpreters’ self-assessment from the perspective of self-regulated learning. FORUM, 23(1), 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.24006.woo

Methods

Face-to-face teaching in the interpreting lab, in booths or isolated stations with separate source and target channels, combining short theoretical presentations, annotated demonstrations of the process by the instructor, individual practice, and pair or whole-class work.

Students rotate through the roles of interpreter, boothmate, and listener. Each cycle includes a first rendition, self-assessment using time-stamped excerpts, feedback, targeted repetition, and application to a new excerpt. Speed, density, register, and duration increase gradually; intralingual paraphrasing and sight translation serve as preparatory exercises.

Language support focuses on analyzing what is said in French and enriching institutional and spoken Greek. The course is taught in close connection with the course “Simultaneous Interpreting Greek ‒ French,” with a shared thematic calendar and a joint final conference but separate assessment for each course.

Use of Information and Communication Technologies

Use of digital teaching materials and “speech repositories” for interpreting practice.

Use of the course’s eClass page for materials, instructions, deadlines, submissions, recordings, and feedback. Audiovisual sources, a projector, listening and recording equipment, official terminology databases, and parallel institutional texts are also used.

Dedicated workbenches and H5P-compatible tools are integrated for interactive, multimodal practice under the instructor’s close supervision and guidance.

Use of Information and Communication Technologies

Use of digital teaching materials and “speech repositories” for interpreting practice.

Use of the course’s eClass page for materials, instructions, deadlines, submissions, recordings, and feedback. Audiovisual sources, a projector, listening and recording equipment, official terminology databases, and parallel institutional texts are also used.

Dedicated workbenches and H5P-compatible tools are integrated for interactive, multimodal practice under the instructor’s close supervision and guidance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used as described below:

• Scope of use. AI may be used solely for the educational purposes listed below and under the instructor’s strict supervision.
• Preparation and teaching. The instructor uses AI to prepare and adapt materials that develop advanced skills, as follows: multimodal exercises of various types, memory exercises, auditory and visual stimuli presented sequentially or simultaneously, activities of graded difficulty, and multiple-choice questions. She reviews all such material herself before using it in class with a projector and other audiovisual media, as described above.
• Workbenches and H5P. AI supports the smooth integration into eClass of dedicated workbenches built on AI platforms and the embedding of H5P-compatible tools. These environments increase interactivity and create specific conditions for interpreting practice, such as combined processing of stimuli, changes of speaker, and controlled increases in difficulty (speed, switching, etc.).
• Performance assessment. AI is not used to assess student performance, except where the parameters and criteria have been strictly defined by the instructor. Any such use remains under her control, and the final evaluative judgment and grading rest solely with her.
• Assignments and research preparation. AI may not be used in student assignments or in reflective activities. For research and preparatory investigation, AI use is recommended only when it is part of exercises in the dedicated workbenches and/or is accompanied by cross-checking of information and sources. This limited use does not lift the ban on producing deliverables with AI.
• Specialized glossaries. AI may assist in identifying candidate terms and exploring specialized glossaries. Every term and every target-language equivalent must be confirmed in official terminology databases and institutional sources in the relevant subject field and specialization, such as IATE, and in official parallel texts. AI suggestions do not constitute documentation and do not replace students’ own research and drafting of the deliverable.
• Critical and responsible use. The course tests the capabilities and limitations of different tools. It examines the accuracy, omissions, distortions, and biases of their outputs, as well as their suitability for interpreting. It fosters well-grounded tool selection, protection of confidential material, and responsible use.

Assessment

In Week 1, an ungraded diagnostic assessment takes place: a mind map, a short recording, a check of the technical equipment, and a feedback interview in which students set two personal goals.

This is followed by formative/continuous assessment. Not all weekly exercises count toward the grade; they are accompanied by descriptive feedback that distinguishes meaning, wording, and strategy, as well as by self-assessment and peer assessment in groups of three (interpreter, boothmate, listener) and/or with the whole class.

Students complete two assignment-preparation projects, in Weeks 6 and 11. Each includes a one-page assignment sheet and 30 glossary entries selected from the weekly research; each entry contains a source term, target equivalent, brief definition, context or collocation, dated source, and validation status.

The criteria are as follows:

• conceptual accuracy and traceability 50%,
• usefulness in the booth 30%,
• justification of choices 20%.

The portfolio is part of the overall assessment. It includes five samples, from Weeks 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12; each contains an initial rendition, a repeat of the excerpt, a new transfer excerpt, and a 250-word analysis in French. The first checkpoint (samples 3 and 5) is assessed after Week 5, and the second (samples 8, 10, and 12, with a 500-word final review) in Week 13. The portfolio criteria are as follows:

• evidence-based diagnosis 35%,
• use of feedback 30%,
• transfer and progress 25%,
• organization and traceability 10%.

The final/summative assessment has three components.

• The midterm test (Week 7) consists of two equally weighted unseen French speeches of four minutes each on a prepared topic, with individual written feedback provided before Week 9.
• The authentic conference simulation (Week 13) is assessed individually.

60% of the simulation grade is based on performance, using the course rating scale, and 40% on observable behaviors:

• usable preparation 15%,
• support and handover (passation) 15%,
• technical protocol and professional judgment 10%.

Students are not penalized for their boothmates’ performance.

The final exam is held in person and consists of two equally weighted unseen French speeches (one structured presentation and one argumentative speech) on topics already covered, at an indicative speed of 105–130 words per minute and with moderate density. The assignment sheet, specifying the audience and the topics, is released 48 hours in advance, without the texts, and students are given 20 minutes of immediate preparation. A personal validated glossary and the assignment sheet are permitted, but live machine translation, outside assistance, and automatic transcription are not. Oral renditions are scored on a common five-criterion scale:

• fidelity and completeness of the message 40,
• processing management and continuity 20,
• quality of spoken Greek 20,
• terminology and data 10,
• clarity and delivery 10.

Each criterion is scored from 0 to 4, with points = weight × level / 4; justified half-levels are allowed, and the same error is not penalized twice. An accurate paraphrase is accepted. The criteria and the schedule are posted on eClass before any graded work.