A Report On Simultaneous Interpreting On Ambassador's Forum And Expert's Forum In ICDS, NDU, PLA

This report is based on the author's simultaneous interpreting for lectures given by renowned scholars and diplomats on the Expert's Forum and the Ambassador's Forum,two programs tailored for high-ranking military officers and defense officials from all over the world participating in the Defense and Strategic Studies Course in the International College of Defense Studies(ICDS),National Defense University(NDU),PLA.The course is a military professional training and exchanges program conducted on a yearly basis.Its curriculum includes international geopolitics and military science with Chinese characteristics.The author selected parts of the recordings and their transcription for case study,mainly from the interpreting for David Gosset,a French Scholar,and Masud Khan,Ambassador of Pakistan to China.The report consists of four main chapters.Chapter one introduces the author's internship in ICDS,two forums and lectures,parties involved in the task and challenges and requirements.Chapter two details the author's preparation for the task,specific interpreting work and unexpected incidents during,as well as self-assessment after the interpreting task.Self-assessment helped the author notice that some of the output in the target language,Chinese,although understandable on the whole,is somewhat different from the spoken Chinese by native speakers,as if the message or “vouloir dire” of the speaker is covered in a shroud of “mist.” Consequently,the audience may encounter obstacles in understanding the original speech.Focused on how to disperse the “mist,” the author turns to the Interpretive Theory in chapter three,introduces the core theoretical concept – deverbalization,and explores the practicality of it in SI.Based on Setton's classification of the manifestations of deverbalization in SI,as well as the author's personal experience in interpreting,chapter four sees that the author analyzes the performance of his simultaneous interpreting from the following five perspectives – context-based lexical correspondence,sentence restructuring,simplification of redundant expressions,addition of subjects,logical connectives and explanatory devices,and innovative recasting.Suggestions are also provided: interpreters should always bear in mind the linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English;interpreters should strengthen self-monitoring and guarantee naturalness and acceptability in their output;interpreters should make sure that they are adequately prepared before each task;interpreters should work on their stress tolerance and adaptability to incidents;and interpreters should make ceaseless efforts in B-language enhancement in a way that is founded in the cultural and logic context of the B-language.In the end,the author concludes by generally reviewing the whole report and highlighting the lessons learned from the task and moreover,the previous two years of learning,training and practicing.