Most people speaking through an interpreter for the first time make the same mistake: they keep talking at their normal length and pace, delivering long, complex sentences that the interpreter then has to reconstruct from memory, often dropping detail or nuance simply because the human working memory required to hold a ninety-second run-on sentence and render it accurately in another language does not exist. Working well with an interpreter is a communication skill in its own right, not a passive activity you simply wait through.
Chunk Your Language
Speaking in shorter, complete thoughts, then pausing to let the interpreter render each chunk, produces a far more accurate rendering than speaking in long paragraphs and pausing only when you run out of breath. Two or three sentences at a time is usually a workable chunk size for consecutive interpretation; much longer than that and even a skilled interpreter starts losing precision, not from lack of skill but from the basic limits of holding that much unstructured language in memory before rendering it.
This is a discipline worth practicing before a high-stakes interpreted conversation, because it runs against the natural instinct to speak in your usual rhythm. Pausing more often than feels necessary to you is, from the interpreter's side, exactly the right amount.
Simplify Structure, Not Content
Complex ideas do not need to be dumbed down for interpretation, but they do need simpler sentence structure. Idioms, culturally specific references, and nested clauses ("the thing I mentioned earlier that relates to what we discussed before the break") are disproportionately hard to interpret accurately and often do not have a clean equivalent in the target language. Saying the same substantive point in a more direct sentence structure, without nested references or wordplay, preserves the meaning while making the interpreter's job dramatically easier. This connects to the broader skill of communicating complex ideas simply, applied under the added constraint that every sentence has to survive translation intact.
Address the Person, Not the Interpreter
A natural but counterproductive instinct is to make eye contact with the interpreter while speaking, since they are the one actively listening and responding to you in the moment. Maintaining eye contact and body language directed at the actual person you are communicating with, even while the interpreter is speaking on your behalf, preserves the sense of direct connection that interpretation can otherwise flatten. The interpreter is a channel, not the audience, and treating them as the audience subtly undermines the relationship you are actually trying to build.
Check for Understanding More Than You Think You Need To
Nodding or a brief acknowledgment after an interpreted statement does not confirm accurate understanding the way it might in a same-language conversation, because subtle misunderstandings can travel through translation without either party noticing immediately. Building in more explicit confirmation than usual, "just to make sure this came through clearly, can you tell me back what you understood," costs a little time and catches misalignments early, before they compound into a larger miscommunication later in the conversation.
The U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division publishes guidance on language access and effective communication through interpreters at justice.gov/crt/language-access, and among its consistent recommendations is exactly this pattern: shorter speaking segments, plain sentence structure, and direct address to the actual listener rather than the interpreter, all of which apply well beyond the formal settings the guidance was originally written for.
Humor Rarely Survives the Trip
A joke that works in one language frequently falls flat, or lands as confusing, once rendered into another, because humor often depends on wordplay, cultural reference, or timing that does not map cleanly across languages. Speakers who lean on humor as a natural part of their style sometimes read the resulting silence as the interpreter failing, when the more likely explanation is that the joke itself simply could not travel. Building rapport through warmth, direct engagement, and genuine curiosity about the other person tends to survive interpretation far better than humor does, and it is worth leaning on more heavily in interpreted settings than you would in a same-language conversation.