Can Watching Movies Help With Spanish Vocabulary?

A lot of the legal terminology that I gained, before I started studying for the interpreter certification exam, was through the John Grisham books.
Many of his books have been made into movies.   So I thought, maybe watching the court proceedings in these movies and interpreting them at the same time, will help me.

This week I rented “The Runaway Jury”.  It went so fast that I had to make notes of the phrases that I couldn’t interpret.  This is good! Now I can look these words up and get them stored somewhere in my brain.  I then put the Spanish subtitles on, I was impressed at the interpretation rendered there. Usually, I get very frustrated when I read the Spanish subtitles in other movies because the translation is so poor. I went back and was able to add phrases to my vocabulary.

Last week I checked out “The Interpreter” from the library. It was a good movie, but didn’t really help me with my vocabulary.  Maybe because I was so involved in the movie itself, and because it doesn’t contain a significant amount of legal terminology.

I do believe movies can help me study for the upcoming oral exam.  I just have to select good movies that have court proceedings.  It also helps if the subtitles are correctly translated into Spanish.
With that said, I will now end this and go back to my flash cards.  They are not as fun as watching movies, but are pretty effective.

Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts Information

In order to become a certified legal interpreter in Arkansas, a candidate must meet all of the requirements of the Administrative Office of the Courts.  We have published many documents from their website on our “Resources” tab of the main menu.

We will be publishing dates and information as it comes available.