Preparation Strategies Before Interpreting

With the development of globalization,interpretation plays an increasingly important role in international communication and has drawn more and more attention.The research and practice of interpretation are also progressing.Interpreting requires an uninterrupted high level of concentration,so it is particularly important to make adequate preparation before doing the job.In order to highlight the importance of pre-interpretation preparation and to demonstrate the influence of pre-interpretation preparation on the quality of interpretation,two videos from Yale University open course “American Fictions after1945” are selected as interpreting tasks.Preparations are made before one task and another task is without preparations.The result shows that the process of interpreting was also smoother in Black Boy which involves preparation than that of The Crying of Lot 49 with no preparation.Some problems such as pauses,misinterpretations and omissions appeared in the process of interpreting The Crying of Lot 49.Through comparison of the two tasks,it is found that preparation before interpretation is highly necessary and very important.On the basis of practice,some strategies for pre-interpretation preparation have been summarized.When preparing for short-term interpreting,especially for literary related topics,interpreters need to pay attention to proper nouns and terms,background knowledge,analysis of characters and plots,interpreter’s mentality and so on.Long term pre-interpretation preparation is by no means a day’s work.Interpreters need to pay more attention to daily accumulation and practice.