A Report On The Simulated Consecutive Interpretation Of The Keynote Speeches Of Caire Webinar On AI And Public Health

The outbreak of COVID-19 has aroused high public attention to the negative effects of public health emergencies,and how to respond to public health emergencies efficiently has become a hot topic.Nowadays,the continuous evolution and breakthrough of artificial intelligence,big data,mobile communications,cloud computing and other technologies have brought new opportunities to improve emergency management of public health emergencies.On 12 th May 2020,the CAi RE of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(HKUST)held a webinar on AI and Public Health.The webinar addressed several issues,including how AI can be used in public health in general,and in fighting COVID-19 in particular;how AI can help prevent other pandemic crises;and what the ethical challenges in using AI for public health are.The interpreter took the keynote speeches of the panelists of the webinar as practice materials to do simulated consecutive interpretation from English to Chinese.There are four speakers at the conference and the keynote speeches are one hour,three minutes and forty-one seconds in total.The interpreter recorded the whole course of the original speech and interpretation content,and transcribed and arranged the on-site recording of the practice.As the interpretation materials are highly professional and the speakers’ speaking habits and accents are different,which causes some difficulties,the interpreter needs to do a lot of preparation.The interpreter summarized the main difficulties into two aspects.One is the influence of the subjective factors of the interpreter,which mainly refers to the influence of the interpreter’s psychological state;the other is the influence of objective factors,including the speakers’ tempos,accents,unforeseen circumstances,and supporting materials.The interpreter practiced and analyzed the results of the practice under the guidance of Gile’s Effort Model to discuss how interpreters should deal with these difficulties,and summarized the specific coping strategies,including speculation based on situational knowledge and logical relationship,omission,communication,etc.,to improve the quality of interpretation performance and enhance professionalism,which has certain guiding significance for future interpreting practice of the interpreter.