School of Foreign Languages January, 2020
On January 25, 2020, 12 teachers and students of the Advanced Engish-Chinese Interpretation Minor Program class embarked on a journey to California, USA, and came to the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, formerly known as the Monterey Institute of International Studies, for seven weeks of translation and interpretation training.
Preparation for the training project started in September 2019. Under the organization and coordination of Professor Zhang Jiliang, and with the full support of the School and the Foreign Affairs Office of the University, after several months of hard work, the School and the Monterey Institute reached an agreement, and the preparation work to go to the United States was completed before the end of the semester. Students of the Advanced Interpretation class have worked together to translate the project contract.
As one of the top three institutes for interpretation in the world, the Monterey Institute is good at cultivating students' practical skills and enjoys a reputation as “the Harvard of translation studies”. It is the dream of every student in interpretation to study at Monterey. This training program is a very precious opportunity for students in our class.
(A group photo of the participants )
The program was also attended by 20 interpreters selected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We and the foreign ministry interpreters were in different classes, but our teachers were the same. On the morning of the 27th, together with the foreign ministry interpreters, we took part in the school opening activities, visited the campus, and listened to lectures about the policy of visiting scholars. In the afternoon, the training program started. The program includes 18 hours each week of courses including two-way consecutive interpretation, two-way simultaneous interpretation, translation, visual interpretation, and English listening and speaking.
Each teacher’s professional ability and teaching have left a deep impression on us, so that we have too many wonderful memories to note down here. Between the heavy training and the life in the small town, everyone was working hard and also exploring. For the first time, we found that English listening and speaking class can contain more than exercises and answers; they can also include a combination of linguistics, psychology, and interpretation.
Ms. Kathi told us that she hoped her seven-week class could help us understand language from both macro and micro perspectives. Particularly impressive was Kathi's observation that the favorite number of all human beings is 3: arguments are often based on three points, and the structure of an article is often divided into three levels. Although there are tens of thousands of articles in the world, they are similar in these respects. Kathi’s insights about language can help the interpreter clarify the logic of speech and predict the content of speech.
Kathi's understanding of subjunctive mood was also refreshing: subjunctive mood does not follow an unchanging rule, because the grammatical structure changes according to the probability of events. We learned how to use her analysis formula to predict some of the contents of a speaker‘s next utterance. Kathi's teaching style made the original boring linguistic theory vivid and interesting. Her new interpretation of old knowledge made us feel the charm of language. This wonderful experience has left on us a particularly deep impression.
Ms. Grace, who teaches Chinese English consecutive interpretation, was very kind to us. Her rigorous teaching style attracted the attention of all the students. In her class, every student had the opportunity to practice on the stage, and she gave detailed comments after each student finished. In her class, we further realized that interpreting notes are not a sets of symbols, but the source language information that the interpreter wants to express. Notes should be the product of the analysis, integration, and reorganization of the source language information, and should reflect the speaker’s thinking logic. What she taught us will greatly benefit us in our further studies and interpreting practice.
(Ms. Kathi)
In addition, her class also enables us to further understand the truth of "life help interpreting". In the training before going abroad, we paid great attention to the problem of language ability. However, Grace pointed out that if the translation is not good, it may not always be language problems, but it may be due to a lack of life experience. She encouraged us to experience more in the English language environment.
After class, Grace also took time to help students with group exercises, pointing out the logical and grammatical problems in translation, and answering questions for us. Before coming to the Middlebury Institute, we paid great attention to the amount of time spent practicing interpretation with our partners. We believed that a lot of practice could effectively improve our listening comprehension and language output.
Grace reminded us that improvement of interpretation skills depends not only on the amount of practice, but also on the reflection about the practice. Without reflecting well, it is difficult to achieve the best training effect. One of the biggest benefits of our study at the Middlebury Institute was finding problems in our learning methods and correcting them.
Ms. Grace (left)
The English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation course was taught by Ms. Marsha from Taiwan, China. At first, Marsha asked us to perform reading and summarizing exercises, prepare for the interpretation, and gradually move to the simultaneous interpreting training. This step-by-step method can help give beginners some pressure while not making it too difficult that they may want to give up. The training materials for simultaneous interpreting are mostly from TED Talks, with various topics and difficulties. After each exercise, the teacher commented on each students’ performance. After the teacher's instruction, we found that our expression was often too wordy and inflexible.
Ms. Ling Lau taught us Chinese and English simultaneous interpreting. Before each practice, she led us to brainstorm, predict the content of the speech, and then practice in the box. After practice, we made comments on each student's practice audio. We were always impressed by her fluent and authentic English. No matter how difficult a speech was, she could understand the speaker's intention right away. The difficulty of the course gradually increased over time. In the last two weeks, we experienced a real working situation of an interpreter: the students worked together in pairs to establish a unique set of booth etiquettes in the box, listening to the input and monitoring the output. This was not easy for us as beginners, but we all enjoyed it and always maintained a high enthusiasm for learning.
Ms. Lisha, who taught us English Chinese consecutive interpretation and visual translation, is a graduate of Shenzhen University. This instantly narrowed the distance between us. Lisha’s class was very challenging because many of us were unfamiliar with the training materials she chose, such as the Federal Reserve Chairman's reflection on the financial crisis, and Nicholas Stern's interview on climate change and economic issues. After class, Lisha asked us to hand in the translation audio and notes, and then she analyzed the students' problems in the next class to help us to see our shortcomings and to make continuous progress.
In the English Chinese translation class, Ms. Cherry shared Peter Newmark's XYZ Theory: before writing, think about whether an article is expressive, informative, or vocal, whether it is soft text or hard text. With the overall understanding of the article, the author's intention can be better conveyed in translation. Scott Myers, who teaches the Chinese English translation course, attached great importance to the correctness of appellations in the process of translation. Zhang Ailing's short story “Blockade” has a sentence at the beginning: “开电车的人开电车” (people who drive trams drive trams). In order to avoid repetition, some of us translated it into "a man was driving the trolley", but Scott gave us the comment: "How do you know that the driver of a tram is a man?" This point was often ignored in our previous translation practice. In Scott’s class we also translated various types of Chinese/English texts, including Zhang Ailing's short stories, Walmart trade union notices, and criticisms on cults. These materials let us truly experience the translation styles of different texts. In addition to commenting on the homework, Scott also led us to discuss in detail the problems existing in the translation homework and showed us the difference between our work and the sample translation.
Seven weeks of study is short, but the “Monterey training model” we experienced here will continue to benefit us in the future. Through this experience, we were also surprised and happy to find that the training mode and modern training equipment of our Advanced Interpretation class are comparable to those of Monterey. With the learning experience of Monterey, our study will certainly be more scientific and efficient.
After class, Monterey's life was peaceful but full of joy. Students who chose to stay with host families experienced the American lifestyle. Host families took us on tours around Monterey and we played golf, tasted wine, and attended parties. Students who chose to rent their own house learned to cook by themselves and experienced a short period of independent life in a foreign country. On weekends, Professor Zhang would invite students to his home. We cooked, barbecued and chatted. Although we were in a foreign country, we could feel the care and warmth of home.
The covid-19 pandemic made returning home difficult, but our School offered great help to us. In order to ensure the safety of the return journey, Dean Zhang Xiaohong, Secretary of School Party Committee Qiu Jiangping, and Deputy Secretary Zheng Chun kept in touch with us via WeChat throughout this period. Mr. Zhang Zhicong, a visiting professor of the School, arranged for vehicles to take us from the Hong Kong airport to the Shenzhen Bay port. When we arrived at the port, we queued up for a body temperature test, and then waited for the bus arranged by the government to pick us up for centralized quarantine. Although we were no longer in a group after we left the Shenzhen Bay Port, on WeChat our teachers always paid attention to us and kept asking how everyone was doing. We also communicated with and encouraged each other. During quarantine, we continued to study interpretation through online teaching.
Just as the old Chinese saying say, “reading thousands of books and traveling thousands of miles”, studying at Monterey was a valuable experience in our lives. During the outbreak of the epidemic, we received the care and help of many teachers, for which we are grateful. We would like to express our thanks to the government, the medical staff, teachers of the School and the University, and Mr. Zhang Zhicong, chairman of the board of directors of Anzhou Eye Hospital and visiting professor of Shenzhen University. With the joint efforts of the School and students, the first Monterey interpretation project was successfully completed on March 13. From March 16 to 18, all of the teachers and students returned to China in two batches.
