A Case Study Of The Quality Assessment Of Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

With the increasingly frequent international exchanges, people’s expectation towards the quality of interpreting becomes higher and higher. Although translators and translation employers have realized the significance of the quality assessment of interpretation, they suffer from a lack of scientific, objective and easy assessment means; in addition, they can hardly find any specialized agency or talent to do the assessment. Therefore, they fail to pay enough attention to the quality evaluation of interpretation.(Cai Xiaohong,2006:100)In order to study the quality assessment of interpretation, this paper mainly uses the quality assessment of interpretation as its theoretical basis and the two Chinese English consecutive interpretation cases as its language material, one of which is the successful consecutive interpretation of Huang Guolun who gives witness and spreads the gospels in the Harvest Church in Singapore, and the other is the unsuccessful consecutive interpretation of Mo Yan who attends the press conference of the Nobel Prize in literature. And in order to make a comprehensive, objective and precise quality assessment of the two consecutive interpretation cases, the author of this paper not only makes result analysis, but also research in-depth the process of the two consecutive interpretations. The findings of the author’s detailed analysis show that the features of two interpreting assignments are different:while the consecutive interpretation of Mo Yan is a formal and two-way exchanging, the interpretation of Huang Guolun is just a one-way and informal speech; Mo Yan articulated his speech in a slow and refined way, whereas Huang spoke fast and frequently mixed his Chinese with English; the interpreter of Mo Yan could sit by his side and took notes, but Huang Guolun’s interpreter could only stand with him using memory to interpret; the original words of Huang Guolun was redundant with prolongations of accent, but Huang Guolun’s interpreter managed to interpret in a quick, simple and smooth way; listeners of the Interpreting of Mo Yan responded very hesitantly, but audiences of the interpreting of Huang Guolun applauded frequently.After combining the result analysis and the process analysis of this two interpretation, a conclusion can be naturally followed that the interpretation errors of "Mo Yan" were mainly caused by subjective reasons like the insufficient advance preparation and the negligence of cultural difference between Chinese and English; while the majority of the interpretation errors of "Huang Guolun" were caused mainly by objective reasons, such as the speaker Huang Guolun’s fast and sometimes disorganized words. In this case, if we only pay attention to result analysis, we would not be able to tell the respective interpretation errors of "Mo Yan" and "Huang Guolun" and understand the choices of interpretation made by the interpreters of the two interpretations. The fact is we probably only know that the interpretation of "Mo Yan" is not ideal or the feedback from the user of the interpretation is unsatisfactory; that there are some errors in the interpretation result of "Huang Guolun" though the feedback from the audience of the interpretation is good. Such an analysis is likely to wrongly attribute all the errors to interpreters themselves for the choice of interpretation they made, and the quality of the interpretation service provided by the interpreters might be mistakenly considered to be unprofessional. After analyzing the two cases, the author finds:1) although the writer of this paper cannot find the exact reasons why the interpreters make mistakes while interpreting, the author can probably know whether the translation mistakes of the two cases are due to the objective factors or not, and more importantly, whether the interpreting of interpreters is based on the characters and styles of the interpreting topic;2) the assessor should get the quality assessment result of the professional interpretation after taking into account the interpretation result, the interpreting process, the work performance of the interpreter, the environment of the interpreting and the interpretation users’ feedback instead of just being concerned about the result or the users’feedback of interpretation;3) different interpretation users have varied expectations and quality evaluation standards towards distinct interpretation tasks. Last but not least, although this paper inevitably has some limitations due to the writing of the author and the content of the paper, I sincerely hope that this paper can provide some references for the future quality assessment of the occupational interpretation.