B3829 - CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING FOR BUSINESS AND HEALTH: CHINESE-ENGLISH

Learning outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to interpret in business meetings (one-to-one, trade shows, negotiations), healthcare settings (hospitals, emergency rooms, day hospitals, clinics), common socio-cultural events (training workshops, visits, exchanges), and general political talks (monologues, dialogues). They will acquire the essential skills to perform consecutive interpreting with and without notes, intercultural competence, knowledge about communication dynamics, and the ability to facilitate multilingual and multicultural communication.

Course contents

This course is aimed at students who have a solid command of Mandarin Chinese and English (at B2 level and above). It will develop students’ skills in listening, analysing, transferring, and delivering English and Chinese speeches, enhance their expressive abilities, and increase the awareness of a diverse range of communicative situations in which English–Chinese interpreters usually work. Students will interpret such topics as business (exhibitions, meetings, and negotiations), healthcare (hospitals and clinics), socio-cultural events (tourism, sports, education, and culture), and political affairs (government talks, trade, diplomacy, and international organisations) in simulated and authentic settings.

The course will focus on the following skills:

• contrastive analysis of English and Chinese language structures, pragmatics, and cultures;
•  effective preparation and knowledge enhancement for interpreting tasks;
•  active listening, analysis of information importance and redundancy, concentration and memory, judicious note-taking, coordination, presentation and delivery, and optimisation;
•  critical analysis of intercultural communications involving interpreting and professional ethics.

The class will be held in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Readings/Bibliography

Recommended readings:

Pinkham, J. (2013). The Translator’s Guide to Chinglish. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Chapters 2–5 and 10 in Setton, R., & Dawrant, A. (2016). Conference Interpreting: A Complete Course. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

李长栓. (2009). 《非文学翻译》. 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社.

劉敏華. (2008). 《逐步口譯與筆記：理論、實踐與教學》. 台北: 書林.

Further readings:

Gile, D. (2009). Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training (Revised ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

梅德明. (2011). 《高级口译教程》（第四版）. 上海：上海外语教育出版社.

莊琬君. (2017). 《與國際接軌必備的中英展場口譯》. 台北：倍斯特出版事業有限公司.

宋菁 & 安文婧. (2015). 《商务英语口译实务·上》. 重庆:重庆大学出版社.

林超伦. (2004). 《实战口译》. 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社.

全国翻译专业资格（水平）考试用书编委会. (2019). 《英语口译实务真题解析·三级》. 北京：新世界出版社.

全国翻译专业资格（水平）考试用书编委会. (2019). 《英语口译实务真题解析·二级》. 北京：新世界出版社.

陳雅齡. (2018). 《法庭口譯：理論與實踐》. 台北：五南.

Teaching methods

In-class activities will consist of

• in-depth discussions of the communicative situations most commonly found in English–Chinese consecutive interpreting;
• progressive exercises of listening for outlines, keywords, and logic, lexical activation of synonyms at the phrase and concept levels, oral summary and paraphrasing, and delivering the same speech in different registers;
•  memory and note-taking practices;
•  consecutive interpreting exercises of live and pre-recorded speeches;
•  critical analysis of one’s own and other’s interpreting performance and discussions of problems encountered and strategies used by interpreters.

In-class activities will be accompanied by self-study in a ratio of one hour to two hours. The self-study activities include: 

• research on topical issues and compiling glossaries for interpreting tasks;
•  consecutive interpreting practices with a partner, ideally someone from a different A-language background;
•  completing the transcription and reflection form for interpreting outputs.

Assessment methods

The exam will consist of the consecutive interpretation of two speeches, one from English to Chinese and the other from Chinese to English. The topics of the speeches will be announced five days prior to the exam. The final mark will be the average score of the two interpretations.

The interpreting performance will be evaluated using the criteria of content fidelity, language quality, and delivery. The assessment rubric is as follows.

• Score: 28–30; Grade: Excellent; Content: full, accurate, and coherent rendering of the message; Language: superior command of the target language, including grammar, terminology, word choice, and style; Delivery: confident, fluent, well-paced and effortless to follow, with proper eye contact, clear pronunciation and diction, and appropriately expressive modulation. 
• Score: 25–27; Grade: Good; Content: faithful and accurate rendering of important message and most details, with no significant meaning errors but occasional loss of non-critical details; Language: solid command of the target language with appropriate grammar, terminology, word choice, and style; Delivery: fluent and effective, minimum hesitation or fillers, occasional self-repair or minor backtracking. 
  
• Score: 21–24; Grade: Fairly good; Content: generally clear rendering of important message and most details, with some message loss, isolated and infrequent minor meaning errors without misleading the audience, lack of clarity in one or more elements due to clumsy, wordy, and inefficient constructions; Language: fair command of the target language with occasional problematic grammar, terminology, word choice, or style; Delivery: easy to follow and clear, some hesitation, fillers, self-repair or backtracking.
• Score: 18–20; Grade: Sufficient; Content: much of the overall message is conveyed with a relatively serious, isolated meaning error that might mislead the audience, a pattern of minor distortions or non-trivial omissions or incompleteness, or insufficient clarity of important message; Language: intelligible with some distracting errors of grammar, word choice, or pronunciation; Delivery: unpolished though tolerable, some hesitation, fillers, self-repair, backtracking, or monotonous tone.
• Score: 0–17; Grade: Insufficient; Content: serious omissions or misrepresentation of important message that mislead the audience; Language: inadequate language skills, e.g. pattern of poor grammar, faulty expressions, inadequate vocabulary, or pronunciation; Delivery: off-putting with unfinished sentences, stammering, halting delivery, staring at notes, poor diction (e.g. mumbling, tiny voice, monotone), constant backtracking or excessive fillers.

Teaching tools

Teaching tools include audio and video recordings of authentic and simulated speeches, audio- and video-taped professional and student outputs, bilingual online dictionaries, corpora, and Apps, introductory texts of relevant fields, bi- and multilingual glossaries and terminology databases, and interpreting during mock or real conferences organised by the DIT.

Office hours

See the website of Nannan Liu