How Hard Is Interpretation?
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How hard is interpretation?
The difficulties I have encountered in the course.
As the Western saying goes: “Rome was not built in one day”, learning how to be an interpreter is just like building Rome. This meaningful idiom tells me a successful interpreter works not only on his inborn ability in reading, listening and speaking, but also on his well-equipped skills in various aspect, for instance, he has to facilitate the communication with his professional knowledge of the meaning, tone and style of different languages. In this journey, different hardships have to get overcome. As a newbie in this field, throughout the one-year interpretation course, there are various difficulties I have encountered in the sight-translation, the shadowing and the live interpretation. They will be examined in the following parts respectively.
As in the sight-translation tasks, which Jean Herbert (1952) characterized sight translation as a type of simultaneous interpreting, a written article or speech are given to us for the source and render the article into a different target language verbally, I always mistakenly regard that as a process of translation which enable me to have time to read the whole original passage, to analyze it and understand the message which the passage is conveying. In this process, I can access to different reference books and resources, such as dictionaries and glossaries, in order to produce an accurate document. Sometimes, I even have time to seek advice from the experienced peers for revision and correction on my work until it is satisfied. Yet, there is no such condition for I to do the above preparation, especially in the classroom. The “bad habit” renders me over-depend on dictionary for looking up the semantic meanings of new words. However, there is no such method available when I do interpretation, so I have to get rid of it. Actually, the limited amount of vocabulary in my “mental storage” is incapable to deal with the tasks. Normally within a 30-minute section, after reading the passage once, I have to start the translation in both consecutive and the simultaneous modes as time may not be inadequate for me to re-read it. In the beginning of the semester, it was not easy for me to get used to the short period of time for doing the translation. Since I always worry about the time given is insufficient for me to get the work done, I needed to remind myself of “time is running out!” and pushed myself to finish it as soon as I could. Thus, the quality of my work somehow has got lowered since my anxiety has affected my performance.
For many scholars, sight translation is just an exercise by which interpreter starters can learn to react quickly and improve their oral skills and get started in the techniques of consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. (Viaggio 1995)Hence, the tougher time just came right after the first stage. In the live interpretation and shadowing exercises on lessons are more difficult than the sight-translation.
It is factual that English is a second language for the local students like me, sometimes the intonation and the accent of fluent English are too native that it is nearly impossible for me to hear it well and grasp every single word in the speech. The omitting of the words will greatly affect the meaning of content in both the shadowing part and the live Interpretation. At that time, I easily get trapped in thinking about the words I missed. Then, the condition will be like “a domino effect”, since my focus is on to “past”, it is unable for me to switch it onto the “present” or even “future” instantly after the mistake I have made. Although I may just miss a few words, the Chinese idiom will be the best to describe my situation “One false step brings everlasting grief”.
Interpretation is totally challenging since every semantic element, including the tone and register