A Report On The "Chat With Champions" Interpreting Project Of The Second Summer Youth Olympie Games

The report is about the Chat with Champions project, which is one of the cultural and educational activities of the Second Summer Youth Olympic Games held in Nanjing from July to August in 2014. The author takes advantages of her role as a simultaneous interpreter in the project, and applies the theory of Daniel Gile’s Effort Model of Simultaneous Interpreting to report and discuss relevant interpreting issues.The author has encountered a lot of difficulties in the process of carrying out the simultaneous interpreting project in terms of listening and analysis, short-term memory, and production. The difficulties are largely intensified because of the instantaneity and synchronism features of simultaneous interpreting. Unlike interpreters in sight interpreting who can always look at the text at hand, simultaneous interpreters have only one chance to listen to the speaker’s speech; nor like interpreters in consecutive interpreting who can start to interpret after hearing a whole sentence, simultaneous interpreters must begin to interpret immediately after listening to a few beginning words of the ongoing speech; the interpreter is demanded to finish the interpretation almost at the same time as the speaker. All these greatly increase the difficulties of simultaneous interpretation.The report describes these difficulties with examples from the transcription of this interpreting project. It analyzes the causes of these difficulties, and puts forward specific measures to solve them, including improving short-term memory by the shadowing exercise method, making adequate pre-task preparations in terms of corpus related to the topic of the speech and the background of the speaker, and using some techniques in simultaneous interpreting, such as syntactic linearity, effective anticipation, and fuzzy expression.The report is aimed to review the whole process of this interpreting project, and draw some experiences and lessons from it, so that the author can improve in the future interpreting practice, and other interpreters can benefit and be enlightened from this report.