Conference Interpreting

Conference interpreting has been recognized as a highly specialized profession requiring the highest level of interpreting skills. Only people with the right aptitude, who have received rigorous, strict and systematic training, will be trusted to deliver the required service. In order to guarantee the excellence of such service, employers of conference interpreters such as international and regional organizations, including the United Nations, the European Union, as well as governments and multinational companies have collaborated with a limited number of like-minded universities to turn out qualified conference interpreters, since the required human and facility resources can best be provided at these universities. These training programs necessarily entail the assessment of the aptitudes critical for would-be conference interpreters, inter alia, the candidate’s command of working languages, his/her knowledge base, his/her ability to adapt and flexibility of her mind.

Entrance Exam

Due to the large number of applicants to the CI program at GIIT each year, a written test is designed and administered as part of the entrance examination. Candidates need to sit for this eliminatory test first, and only about 2 dozens will be short-listed for an interview. The written test is composed of two parts, a written test and a recorded oral test. During the written test, candidates are required to finish Cloze, Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension and Guided Writing in the candidate’s B language within three hours, followed by another three hours a translation test. Besides, candidates are also required to participate in a recorded oral test, usually a quasi sight translation task into the candidates’ B language which usually lasts for five minutes.

Those candidates that pass the eliminatory aptitude test will then be short-listed for an invited interview which takes around thirty minutes. The interview starts with some small talk for the candidates to warm up, before they hear a 5-minute talk on a general topic, in their first foreign language which will develop to be their B language. The candidate would then retell, or do pseudo interpreting into their mother tongue. Then the candidate will be hearing the other talk, of similar nature, in the mother tongue, which will be retold or interpreted into the B language. The jury members will then ask questions based on the candidate’s performance to give him or her an opportunity to either correct mistakes or to clarify what he or she intends to say. The jury will deliberate on the candidates’ performance based on: (1) Content skills (accuracy/fidelity), (2) Communication skills (presentation/coherence), and (3) Language skills. The candidates will be graded on each of the above 3 aspects as Distinction, Pass, and Weak.

Candidates who have shown the right aptitude through the written and oral exams described above will be admitted.

The Mid-point Exam

The mid-point exam focuses on one particular mode of working, consecutive interpreting. As the name “mid-point” suggests, which comes from an analogy drawn between interpreting training and a long-distance running, the exam serves as a quality check on achievements made by students after one year of intensive training. This is crucial to ensuring high-quality training because (Donovan 2006):

a. Mid-point exam provides students with an opportunity to test how solid their interpreting skills acquired from consecutive interpreting training are, and whether they are fully ready for simultaneous interpreting. For newcomers to simultaneous interpreting, split of attention would usually be the biggest challenge. People tend to believe that only simultaneous interpreting requires interpreters to do multiple tasks at the same time, yet in consecutive interpreting, multi-tasking occurs when interpreters listen, analyze, and take notes at the same time before they deliver the interpretation. Therefore a good command of consecutive interpreting is a considerable asset for learning simultaneous, in particular at the initial stage. Students need good consecutive skills to do well in simultaneous interpreting.

b. Mid-point exam provides students with an opportunity to check whether their language skills are strong enough to stand the test of simultaneous interpreting. Though the author is not in favor of the argument that simultaneous is more difficult than consecutive, it is true that with added time pressure coming from simultaneity, interpreters need consummate language skills to do a good job, especially for those who work into both their A and B language(s). For example, on private market in China, customers, native speakers of English in particular, complain that although interpreters generally can make sense in simultaneous interpreting, their output in English sometimes sounds unnatural, which could get annoying. Besides, in order to achieve excellence in delivery, interpreters must have their working languages functioning like their second nature. Otherwise, if they have yet to struggle linguistically, their life would be made much harder. That is why only those who can demonstrate a reasonably good command of their working language(s) in the mid-term exam will be allowed to start learning simultaneous interpreting.

c. Mid-point exam provides students with an opportunity to see whether they are truly suitable for the profession before they dedicate valuable resources to the intensely strenuous study of interpreting. Though generally designed for pedagogical purposes to assess achievements in interpreting skills, the mid-point exam also allows students to have a unique chance to reflect upon their career choices. As a matter of fact, not everyone can become first-level professional interpreter within a limited period of time even with intensified training, for instance, two years. And as myth about interpreting and interpreters abounds, students may not have known the profession well before their application. After having received professional training for one year and practiced a lot, they will have had a taste of working as a conference interpreter, which will allow them to rethink and opt out.

In the mid-point exam, the candidates are supposed to demonstrate that they are already professionally operational in consecutive interpreting.

The Professional Exam

The Professional Exam is the comprehensive exam in simultaneous and consecutive conference interpreting that CI students take at the end of their two years of professional training before a jury of experienced professional interpreters, as described at the beginning of this paper.

Candidates who pass the Professional Exam are certified to be fully operational to international professional standards in simultaneous and consecutive conference interpreting.

Structure and standard The Professional Exam comprises the following six tasks: (1) Consecutive Interpretation, B into A (CI B-A) (2) Consecutive Interpretation, A into B (CI A-B) (3) Simultaneous Interpretation, B into A (SI B-A) (4) Simultaneous Interpretation, A into B (SI A-B) (5) Simultaneous Interpretation with Text, A into B (SIw/txt A-B) (6) Simultaneous Interpretation with Text, B into A (SIw/txt B-A)

For candidates with a C language, the Professional Exam will further include the following three subjects:

Consecutive Interpretation, C into A (CI C-A) ? Simultaneous Interpretation, C into A (SI C-A) ? Simultaneous Interpretation with Text, C into A (SIw/txt C-A)

For more information about Professional Diploma in Conference Interpreting(PDCI), Please click here