1. Asking
Interpreters may ask the speaker to further explain the meaning of the terms they are not quite familiar with. Many special terms, especially abbreviations, when explained become easy to understand. For instance,"FOR" is an abbreviation commonly used in foreign trade, however, not every interpreter is expected to know the term. Only by asking the speaker can interpreters get a clear definition of the term. "FOR" stands for "Free on Rail", a contract term meaning that the seller pays for all charges up to, including the placing of a consignment on a public railway locomotive. Again, "loco" is always used in association with a place-name, meaning that delivery will be made, free, to any location in the specified area, e. g. "loco Manchester".
Sometimes interpreters can even ask the audience who are usually experts in a specific field.
It should be noted that asking too frequently will interrupt the speaker and spoil the translation.
2. Guessing
Guessing is also a very useful skill in oral translation which can be carried out by deducing the meaning from the context and the logical relations involved in the speech, and by interpreter's knowledge about etymology, word-formation, etc. As we know, in English many common words have specific meanings in science and various derivations, for example, the word“library”wben used in computer technology can mean“程序库”;the word“mismatching”（失配）comes from“match”（匹配）.
“Guessing" works well in oral translation, but inaccurate guessing will do harm.
3. Skipping
As is previously stated, it is necessary for interpreters to render ideas instead of words. If an interpreter has completely understood the passage, he/she can translate the central idea of the passage, skipping over the individual words/terms he/she does not know without spoiling the meaning of the whole passage. However, in technical interpretation, almost all of the special terms are key words. Skipping over such words would be a great risk. Therefore, the skill of skipping should be used carefully.
4. Reading
Sometimes interpreters still find it hard to understand some of the technical terms even after the speaker's explanation; sometimes they seem to have understood the speaker, but can not get a proper translation at the moment. Under such circumstances, they may repeat the word or term, as if they are doing "transliteration". The result may be that (i) the audience will come to help and (ii) the audience understand it well because they use the transliteration in their academic field too. For instance, UFOs standing for Unidentified Flying Objects can be interpreted as ('ju;fauz) if the interpreter can not find the equivalent“飞碟”in Chinese at the moment.
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