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TRA5401 Foundation in Chinese to English Simultaneous Interpreting: Home

Course Description

This course focuses on the development of students’ Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting capacity, including shadowing, text analysis, segmentation, de-verbalization and other coping tactics. Class will be conducted in the forms of in-class exercise, individual performance, group discussions, peer reviews, case reviews, etc. The course will enhance students’ abilities of multi-tasking, analysis, decision-making and execution of coping tactics for accomplishing CN-EN SI tasks. It aims at developing students’ basic conference interpreting skills in preparation for a career in conference interpreting.

Recommended Books

Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training

The target audience of this book is the practitioners and instructors of conference interpreting and/or translation. Gile argues that professional translation entails students’ understanding of the theoretical approach that translation serves for communication between the initiator and the receptor. He points out that adding or deleting words and reframing sentences do not necessarily violate the principle of fidelity, and that translation must be conducted with discourse comprehension. Gile offers a number of models for simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, sight translation, and simultaneous with texts, including a sequential model, the effort model of simultaneous interpreting, and the IDRC model (Interpretation-Decision-Resources-Constraints).

Conference Interpreting: A Student’s Practice Book

This book is loosely based on an earlier publication, Conference Interpreting – A Students’ Companion published in 2001 in Poland. It offers some guidelines for effective practice and a compilation of practice exercises drawn from conference interpreting literature and teachers. The book consists of four parts. Part 1 offers general principles for effective practice drawn from the author’s own extensive experience as an interpreter and interpreter-trainer. Part 2 covers language enhancement at very high level. Part 3 and Part 4 cover the key sub-skills needed to effectively handle the two components of conference interpreting- simultaneous and consecutive interpreting.

Conference Interpreting Explained

This book unravels the process of conference interpreting in a descriptive manner. There are 5 chapters in this book. Chapter 1 gives answers of some basic questions such as what is an interpreter, what is conference interpreting, what is consecutive interpreting, and what is simultaneous interpreting, etc. Chapter 2 presents the basic principles of consecutive interpreting- understanding, analyzing, and re-expressing. Chapter 3 expands on note-taking in consecutive interpreting. Chapter 4 mainly focus on simultaneous interpreting, especially the technique of simultaneous interpreting. In Chapter 5, Jones expresses his pleasure with interpreting.

The Interpreting Studies Reader

This book is an anthology of texts in the discipline of Interpreting Studies. Part 1 collects works before 1975 that opened the era of conference interpreting. Part 2 collects more works that build up the foundations of conference interpreting during the 1970s. Part 3 focus on works that presents efforts to construct models of the interpreting process in the 1990s. Part 4 covers works from the sociological and situational perspectives as well as the semiotic dimension. Part 5 addresses the discourse studies and pragmatics. Part 6 explores underlying patterns of interpreter performance and its reception by the user. Part 7 focus on non-conference settings of interpreting.

Introducing Interpreting Studies

This textbook is designed to provide students, instructors, researchers, and practitioners with an overview of interpreting studies. This book consists of ten chapters organized into three parts. Chapters 1 to 5 make up the synthetic representation of interpreting studies in terms of concepts, developments, approaches, paradigms and models. Chapters 6 to 9 are devoted to an analytical presentation of the state of the art. Chapter 10, the only chapter that constitutes Part 3, reviews the major trends and future perspectives of interpreting studies as a field of research, and offers further suggestions for individual researchers.

Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting

This book collects 12 essays written by participants at the seventh Kent Psychology Forum, a forum sponsored annually by the Applied Psychology Center at Kent State University. The authors apply concepts and methods of cognitive science to translation, focusing on the relationship between translation theory, research and practice. They try to answer questions such as the unique characteristics of translation and interpreting relative to monolingual languaging processes, the relationship between bilingual language processing and translation/interpreting skill, the important cognitive parameters of the translation and interpreting tasks, methods and models used to investigate the cognitive processes of translation and interpreting.

Recommended Databases