A Report Of Simulated Simultaneous Interpreting Practice Based On The Online Smart Cities Webinar

This report is generated from the simulated simultaneous interpreting practice based on Chris Vein’s Online Smart Cities Webinar. Following the three rules proposed by Hans Vermeer in his Skopos Theory, this report seeks to find out the solutions to various problems during the practitioner’repeated simulated simultaneous interpreting practice to achieve the desired effect of skopos, coherence and fidelity.This report first describes the problems that the practitioner encountered and identified during her simulated practice, including linguistic problems, namely, lexical problems and syntactic problems, and non-linguistic problems, namely, the role that the practitioner/interpreter is expected to play in the simulated interpreting practice.Through the repeated practice, the practitioner came up with the solutions to the identified problems. In terms of the lexical problems, the practitioner paid close attention to the multi-meanings of a particular collocation of the source language and made the best of her flexibility of converting the culture-specific meanings of the lexis into ones that are basically acceptable in the target culture. With regard to syntactic problems, the practitioner tried her best to abandon the sentence structures or voice in the source language and processed them into her own language characteristic of typical Chinese word order or syntactic structures. As a result, the interpreted version sounds more coherent, smooth and natural.As regards the interpreter’s role, the practitioner learned from her own experiences that she had to stand in the speaker’s place and kept herself on the same footing with the speaker. Meanwhile, she had to have a good knowledge of the target audience and show the biggest respect for language habit of the target audience so that her interpreting was naturally made more understandable.The practitioner’s reflections upon her own practice suggest that, apart from the bilingual control and code-switch capability, interpreting strategies come from nothing but mega amount of repeated practice, which is particularly important to the beginners. The present report may also have some practical implications for the practitioners who are to accomplish similar interpreting tasks.