Difficulties of Simultaneous Interpreting from Translation Students' Perspective (original) (raw)

Teaching and Learning Simultaneous Interpreting at Kurdistan Region Universities: Challenges and Strategies

Academic Journal of Nawroz University

Simultaneous Interpreting (SI henceforth) is a mode of oral translation which plays an important role in the realm of translation. SI is unlike written translation where the prior is more difficult when it comes to practice in the field. Moreover, SI is an exclusive skill which requires more than an ability to speak many languages. It is a process that leads people to communicate directly across cultural boundaries. The key problem is how to mitigate or overcome SI obstacles. This problematic area is going to be investigated in this study. The main aim of this study is to highlight the key challenges and problems facing the process of teaching and learning SI, then to find out strategies to address all the challenges of teaching and learning SI that instructors and students are currently facing. This study hypothesizes that having neither facilities nor well-trained teachers pose problems for teaching and learning SI at the Departments of Translation; students are troubled by learni...

Strategies in English-into-kurdish And Arabic Translation Adopted by University Students And Their Impact on The Translation Quality

The Journal of University of Duhok

This paper examines the strategies used by 4 th year students in translating a literary text into Kurdish and Arabic and the difficulties they face and how they overcome them and generate a quality final output. Think-aloud Protocols are used as a tool for investigating what is in the students' minds during the process. The study is designed as a series of experiments using five fourth-year translation students, at the University of Duhok. To process the data, the qualitative analysis was adopted. Regarding the findings, prior reading of the text was often applied by the participants as a starting point of the process. The two main problems encountered during the process were: text comprehension and the translation of references and symbols located in the text. Regarding the strategies, employing Google Translate, reading the text and the translation repetitively, and offering a literal translation to challenging items were applied. Rendering a mistranslation, and skipping a word/phrase for a while and moving to the next for connectivity were the least used strategies found among the study sample. Relying on an effective translation quality assessment model (Waddington, 2001), the influence of these strategies on the final product, was also examined by a qualified jury. It is hoped that the paper findings can shed light on the translation strategy teaching and improving students' translation competence.

Simultaneous Interpreting Competence: A Case Study Simultaneous Interpreting Competence: A Case Study Simultaneous Interpreting Competence: A Case Study Simultaneous Interpreting Competence: A Case Study 1

The concept of competence in Translation Studies came to the fore in the 1990s although the first proposals were put forward in early 1970s.This term became so important that many universities around the world offering Translation/Interpreting programs tried to develop their curricula accordingly, a move forward that is still going on globally. However, what has been rather under-researched is the concept of Simultaneous Interpreting Competence. As a narrow part of a doctoral dissertation, the present study tried to develop an Interpreting Competence Model and apply it to professional simultaneous interpreters in Iran. To this end, the study included a conceptual and an empirical phase. In the conceptual phase, different translation competence models from the 1970s up to the present were compared and a Translation Competence Model was designed. Similarly, different interpreting competence models from 1930 up to the present were analyzed and an Interpreting Competence Model was developed. The conceptual phase concluded with the common and distinct competences required for professional translators and interpreters. In the empirical phase, the Simultaneous Interpreting Competence Model developed in the conceptual phase was applied to professional Interpreters. The case study included simultaneous interpreters from two Iranian news channels, PRESS TV and IRINN. The findings indicated that Iranian interpreters were lagging behind in certain sub-competences.

The Strategic Behavior of Undergraduate Students in Simultaneous Interpreting

مجلة الدراسات الاجتماعية

This paper aimed at identifying and describing strategies employed by senior students in Simultaneous Interpreting (SI) in the translation program, University of Science and Technology, Sana'a -Yemen. It also attempted to establish a correlation between students' use of interpreting strategies and their results in summative assessment. To achieve these objectives, 21 senior students were selected to interpret an English audio into Arabic. Their interpreting performance was analyzed in order to investigate the frequency of using interpreting strategies and explain reasons for strategy selection. The total frequency of strategy use of each student was compared with his/her final SI result. The study findings suggested that students' strategy use was highly governed by their aim to minimize processing capacity requirements and to recover the source text message. There was also evidence that the use of interpreting strategies could positively affect students' interpreting quality. The paper concluded by providing some useful recommendations for interpreter training.

Note-taking in Persian-English Consecutive Interpreting: Considering Iranian Translation Teachers' and Students' Opinions

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2018

Note-taking is one of the essential skills which is used to facilitate the process of consecutive interpreting and the different aspects of the cited skill has been investigated in the history of interpreting. But despite of this significance, very little related research could be found about note-taking in Persian-English consecutive interpreting. Due to this paucity, the present study explored and examined the translation teachers' and students' opinions in this respect in order to identify the weaknesses of teaching and utilizing note-taking during the process of consecutive interpreting particularly in Iranian academic contexts. For the purpose of this research, four interpreting teachers from different Iranian universities, besides 10 male and female undergraduate translation students of quoted academic context who had passed interpreting courses, were selected meticulously and by means of phone interview, the required data were collected. The results of this investigation clearly indicate that, as well as teaching interpreting courses by the non-qualified teachers more often than not, the used syllabuses for interpreting courses do not cover all aspects of the issue and should be redesigned according to the students' future needs in the role of the professional interpreters. Additionally, while almost all general concepts, techniques and strategies are totally unfamiliar to translation students, they entirely acknowledge the necessity of learning much more about note-taking.

Training on Simultaneous Interpreting at Undergraduate Level in Türkiye: Analysis of Resources

TranSynergy: Journal of Translation, Literature, and Linguistics, 2022

Simultaneous interpreting is a significant subfield of translation and interpreting activities, and it is generally perceived as the most difficult form of translational practice since it requires a high command of using comprehensive and productive skills at the very same time and it necessitates a special working environment (soundproof booths equipped with necessary technical sound systems). The educational process of this profession, on the other hand, becomes more challenging, especially in Türkiye, due to the limited technical and human resources offered in the departments of translation and interpreting in the country. By taking into account this challenge, the present study aims to analyze the current technical and human resources allocated for the training of interpreters at the undergraduate level in Türkiye. In line with this aim, the present study will offer numerical data on the presence of laboratories for simultaneous interpreting and the profile of interpreter-academicians working in the departments of translation and interpreting in Türkiye. The locations of the universities, the presence of laboratories, the research fields of academicians, the number of interpreteracademicians, and the impacts of all these factors on the training of simultaneous interpreters will be discussed in detail to create an awareness of the limited resources in the field in Türkiye.

The Investigation of Interpreters’ Stress during Simultaneous Interpretation from English into Arabic and Vice Versa

paper, 2023

This paper deals with simultaneous interpreting as a demanding cognitive task that involves various cognitive processes under severe time pressure; it is considered one of the most stressful tasks which causes heavy cognitive load on interpreters. Stress in interpreting refers to those responses that have emotional and harmful effects which occur when the requirements of the task are more than interpreter’s available resources. Interpreters experience different types of stress during Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) such as environmental, i.e. temperature, humidity and air quality as well as Psychological stress affected by personal factors such as self-confidence and the situation judgment way. The study aims at investigating stress experienced by professional and student interpreters during English-Arabic-English SI. It is hypothesized that the more professional the interpreter is, the more able s/he is to successfully cope with this stress by utilizing some stress coping strategies. In order to investigate the impact of stress on the interpreter’s performance when rendering simultaneously and to study interpreters’ awareness of stress, 40 student and 3 professional interpreters are chosen to participate in English-Arabic-English interpreting tasks. The study concludes that both groups experienced stress in this dual task. However, students’ stress has negative effects on their performance and on the interpreting process when they resorted to pause and omit the SL segments. On the other hand, professionals’ stress motivated them to search and apply stress coping strategies such as inferring the meaning of the source message and generalization.

An Investigation into Hufi English-Majored Students’ Issues with Translation and Interpretation

2021

English Language programs that seek to offer learners adequate English skills and translate strategies to conduct in multilingual environments include translation and interpretation. However, translating effectively is not a simple task because English language skills are not the only factor to consider; other factors also play a role. Owing to their poor language proficiency and comprehension of translation methods, many HUFI English-majored students have no experience with translation and interpretation. Therefore, this paper looked at how HUFI English-majored students approach translation and interpretation tasks and how successful those translated versions are in relation to the original Vietnamese documents. The results showed many incorrect translated items caused by “word-by-word” translation or meta-phrase technique and the influence of the Vietnamese language on two translated texts and talks from ten participants. Teachers of translation and interpretation subjects and stu...

The Impact of Intercultural Complications on Interpreting

Arabic Journal for Translation Studies, 2023

The aim of this graduation research thesis, The Impact of Intercultural Complications on Interpreting, is to introduce future interpreters to some strategies that they could use in case they are faced with intercultural differences during the process of simultaneous interpretation from English into Arabic and vice versa . The research paper is organized into two parts. The first part includes two chapters: The first chapter reviews relevant theories about cultural differences in translation studies, while the second one highlights previous relevant research, the second part also contains two chapters. The third chapter brings out methods used in the process of data collection and the fourth one includes a detailed presentation and discussion of the research findings.