Snailing it:
Strategies for Slow Speakers

About the lecture

Fast speakers are stressful. Slow speakers are exhausting.

Interpreters dread fast speakers, but slow speakers present their own unique challenge. When a speaker drags, you run out of working memory, lose focus, and struggle to construct natural sentences.

During this 2-hour lecture, we will explore practical strategies to manage slow source speech, control your ear-voice span (EVS), and maintain high delivery standards without losing composure.

What we will cover

• The slow-speech phenomenon — Why slow speakers disrupt your interpreting rhythm and working memory.
• EVS control — How to deliberately expand or contract your lag to match the speaker's pace.
• Syntactic restructuring — Practical strategies to chunk and reorganise slow sentences into natural English delivery.

Who is this for?

Conference and community interpreters who want to maintain high accuracy and professional delivery when the source speaker is extraordinarily slow.

Lecture details

Pay what you can

Suggested donation: €15–€20 (or equivalent in UAH).

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 lecture that is as rigorous as it is practical.

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

Frequently asked questions

• How long will the recording be available?

  You will have access to the video recording for 90 days. You can listen from anywhere in the world at a time that suits you.

• What language is the lecture held in?

  The lecture is held entirely in English.

• Is it interactive?

  Yes. This is not a passive webinar. We will do practical, voice-on exercises to test these strategies in real time.