Sharing of experience in on-site interpretation

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1. Attitude: This is the most important factor. In fact, many people have a good command of language, but due to nervousness, they are unable to organize what they hear and write down in a coherent manner. Nervousness also greatly reduces the audience’s trust in you. Whether you understand everything or not, you must remain calm and try to organize your words based on the context and what you’ve heard, ensuring that the overall direction remains correct. It was my first time doing interpretation in a large-scale setting; although it was relatively simple, nervousness was inevitable. At such times, it’s necessary to reduce stress—something like having an “Ah Q” attitude. I’ve only been learning interpretation for about a month; anyway, I forgive myself. A moderate level of nervousness can actually be beneficial, as long as it doesn’t affect the translation. But even though I can forgive myself, I still need to be responsible toward the audience. Everyone was very kind yesterday, and the teacher also mentioned our three interpreters before starting his speech, asking everyone to forgive any mistakes we made during translation.

2. Composure: According to everyone’s feedback, one of my strengths is my composure—I stay calm under pressure. During the Q&A session yesterday, someone deliberately made things difficult by using many technical terms and arguing with the teacher about interpretation psychology, memory systems, and the P-note-taking method. What’s worse, that person didn’t use a microphone at the end! The atmosphere was tense, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that all the audience members were looking at us three interpreters rather than the speaker and the questioner. One of the female interpreters was quite nervous, and I stopped taking notes halfway because I couldn’t hear clearly. But later, some audience members said they couldn’t tell any changes in my expression and thought I remained calm. In reality, I was also upset with that person, but as an interpreter, I can’t let my emotions influence my translation. I told myself that I was just a machine. Teacher Huang was very understanding and said that part didn’t need to be translated, then he responded to that person in Chinese in a polite and intelligent way. I felt really satisfied at that moment.

3. Adaptability: The Q&A session is challenging because questions are unpredictable, which tests one’s ability to adapt. I’m not satisfied with myself yesterday because I didn’t simplify repetitive statements. Since the audience asked questions verbally and the teacher answered them verbally, some key points were repeated, but sometimes they only needed to be translated once. Another issue was logic—many of the unprepared questions and answers lacked logic, and it was up to the interpreter to clarify this logic. However, the interpreter must start translating within 3 seconds after the speaker finishes speaking. Yesterday, I started translating right after one second had passed, so some sentence structures and expressions weren’t perfect.

4. Finding a balance between short-term memory and note-taking: The teacher said that my performance yesterday wasn’t as good as last time because I took more notes. In fact, much of the information can be remembered in the mind, but trying to record everything ends up affecting the quality of translation. Before learning note-taking methods, we relied on memory, and it worked well—more organized too. Because during the process of processing information and converting it into short-term memory, you already organize what you’ve heard logically, creating an overall outline. Yesterday, I relied too much on notes, and when I looked back at them, I couldn’t remember what some of them meant, so I had to discard them.