Research On The Interpreting "Workshop" Teaching Model To Improve MTI Student Interpreters’ Professional Competence

With more and more communication with other countries of the world in suchfields as politics, economy, culture, education and technology, China is in urgent needof large numbers of professional interpreters. Meanwhile, interpreting as a professionand an industry poses more and higher requirements for interpreters, who are notmerely language transmitters, but a versatile person. However, interpreters in Chinacannot meet the requirements of professional competence like the lack of knowledgecompetence, professional skills, psychological and physical qualities. One majorcause may be that the traditional interpreting teaching can hardly cultivate such kindof compound talents.In view of this, the thesis seeks to find out the level of MTI student interpreters’professional competence by means of questionnaire based on Cai Xiaohong’sevaluation model of interpreter’s professional competence and to propose aninterpreting workshop teaching model,which is theoretically explained on itsfeasibility to improve MTI student interpreters’ professional competence, andempirically verified through various methods like pre-test and post-test, questionnaire,observation and interview.Based on the researches on professional competence that a professionalinterpreter is supposed to possess home and abroad, professional competence ofinterpreting is defined and its components are established in the thesis. Professionalcompetence of interpreter is defined as the expertise or expert knowledge, bothdeclarative and procedural. It consists of the following three competences: knowledgecompetence, professional skills, psychological and physiological quality. In the thesis,three Universities are surveyed (all are “211project” Universities) on the level ofMTI student interpreters’ professional competence(all are in the first grade), and anempirical study on the interpreting workshop is conducted in one of the threeUniversities. By processing the data, we come to the following results: Firstly, theaverage scores of the MTI interpreters’ level of professional competence arebetween"weak"and "tolerable". MTI student interpreters’ level of the psychologicaland physiological quality is the highest, followed by the knowledge competence andprofessional skills. Secondly, from the theoretical perspective, thesocial-constructivist interpreting “workshop”, which is composed of fourmodules(objective, supervisor, work team, practice site) is feasible to improve MTI student interpreters’ professional competence by conceptual speculation. Thirdly,through combination of qualitative and quantitative research by means of pre-test andpost test, questionnaire, observation and interview, MTI student interpreters’professional competence is obviously improved. The five best developed componentsof PC are: subject knowledge, public speaking competence, teamwork ability,interpersonal skills and public etiquette, followed by stress tolerance and confidence,finally language knowledge, discourse competence, pragmatic competence, workingattitude and acquaintance of the interpreter’s right, interpreting task contract andpayment. Based on the results, we may conclude that in interpreting teaching for MTIstudent, we should also pay much attention to the the cultivation of professionalcompetence, especially professional skills and knowledge competence to meet themarket demand, the social-constructivist interpreting “workshop” is feasible as thesupplemental course to improve MTI student interpreters’ professional competence.The thesis is aimed at exploring interpreting “workshop” teaching model ofMTI based on social constructivism. By developing MTI student interpreters’professional competence, the model is favorable for the students to get a job and forthe development of economy in the interpreting industry. Moreover, the model canprovide new thoughts on interpreting teaching, such as the teaching objective setting,the teaching faculty construction, and the teaching organization expansion, thusfacilitating the development of interpreting as discipline.