ABSTRACT
I am sure you are relieved to reach the end of this book, and you will be relieved whenever a speaker gets to the end of what they have to say. But be careful not to let your guard down too soon. The chances are that the very last thing the speaker says will be quite important. It may be a punchy slogan; it may be the essence of everything that has gone before it in the speech; it may be an appeal to the audience based on what has just been said. It may be all of these things or something else, but most speakers like to go out with a bang, and so it is very likely that it will be an important part of the speech. You can usually hear the end coming in a speech. When you do, listen to it even more carefully than you have been listening already. You may even want to stop taking notes and listen only for a moment. Once they have grasped what has been said, many interpreters will write out this part of the speech in much more detail, even in a virtually longhand translation, just to make sure they will get it right in their version. Remember, the speaker will have stopped speaking by now, so you will have a few seconds of extra time to write things down. That being said, you don’t want to keep the audience waiting while you scribble away for minutes either.
