A Tentative Training Package Of English/Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

Simultaneous interpretation (hereafter SI for short) is the most difficult and demanding mode of interpretation, it is therefore, the common practice to offer such a course at postgraduate level. Interpreting research in the west has been characterized with interdisciplinarity, so is the SI research. While the Interpretative Theory of Paris School, from Liberal Arts Community remains to be influential, fruits from other sciences like psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology give a strong impetus to SI research.China is still at its infancy concerning SI research studies though a large number of endeavors have been made. The research has not been confined to the introduction of the state-of-art of the interpreting research in the west only, but extended to the dedication to the establishment of interpreting as an independent discipline, to the design of teaching syllabus and curriculum, to the setup of the efficient and effective teaching modes, thus pushing the process of the professionalism of interpreting to meet the rapidly growing market demands.The present paper is, therefore, to make attempts at proposing a tentative skilled-based E/C SI training package designed for university forth-year English majors by drawing heavily on the research findings of both liberal arts community and natural sciences community, namely, the deverbalization and reformulation of Interpretative Theory of Paris School, deconstruction of the mental process of SI, attention and memory from cognitive science, and the operational formula of Daniel Gile. Within the package, shadowing exercise is to train the students' divided attention and robust memory; consecutive, as "training wheels" , reformulation, divided attention and memory retention; and set handing skills of English problematic sentences, deverbalization and automacity of production, thus leaving more efforts available for listening and analysis, memory and coordination.The training package was implemented in the subsequent experiment with sixty-one forth-year English majors for three months. The contrastive analysis of the pre-test and post-test performance difference on improvement significance, with an aid of computer software SPSS, showed that the effectiveness of the training package and the feasibility of offering such a SI course at undergraduate level.