A Report On The Interpretation Of A Documentary Under The Dome

This interpretation practice report expounds an empirical and quantitative case study on the interpreter’s personal Simultaneous Interpretation(SI) process, which aims at pinning down major deficiency in her SI performance, working out possible strategies to overcome the deficiency and improving her overall SI performance.The practice material chosen for the SI experiment consists of three excerpts from a documentary on environmental protection, Under the Dome, presented by Chai Jing, former presenter and journalist with China Central Television. Those three excerpts are the opening 15-minute speech, the ending 15-minute speech and a 15-minute speech in between. Based on that, the case study has experimented with three rounds of SI emulational practice. Each round involves four parts: a 15-minute interpretation task, a post-interpretation assessment, a quantitative analysis of the deficiency factors and a follow-up counter-deficiency training.By means of the assessment model from quantitative and qualitative theory, the case study has conducted quantitative assessment for all the three SI practice performance. The integrated analysis of the first–round practice indicates that the major deficiency in the interpreter’s SI process is information omission; therewith, on the basis of the Effort Model of simultaneous interpretation proposed by Daniel Gile, the interpreter speculated that the major deficiency was resulted from mental efforts imbalance in SI process. Therefore, she made some hypothetical experiment exploration to solve the major deficiency, and contrived two possible effective countermeasures, i.e. coordination competence training and change of memory processing unit. In the following training section, simultaneous shadowing, note-taking and retelling training is the main approach. The second round aims to test the effect of those two countermeasures, and ensuing improvement in SI performance proves the positive effect, which indicates that the two possible countermeasures are feasible and workable. The following third round is utilized to further verify the countermeasures. Three-round data comparison analysis manifests that the major deficiency of information omission is improved to a large extent, and the two countermeasures are effective.The 4A model(Assessment-Analysis-Adaptation-Advancement) explored by the interpreter in this report might be appropriate for MTI students to perform self-evaluation and self-improvement. The experiment has also raised some new ideas about interpretation assessment theory and the Effort Model. Further studies are required among the academic community in this regard, so as to offer MTI students credible and feasible methods for self-assessment and self-improvement on the basis of their simultaneous interpretation performance.