Interpreting Competence In The Apprentice Stage

The acquisition of interpreting competence is a multi-stage process: it includes novice, apprentice, competent and expert/master stage. Previous studies have put more stress on the two ends of the process (like the novice-expert paradigm of interpreting competence) than on the middle rungs. To better understand what apprentice stage is like, the author conducts a survey of China's undergraduates in translation and interpreting program (T&I major), studies the students'interpreting competence and ways to develop them. The research questions are defined as: what are the features of the interpreting competence of T&I major? How is such competence developed by the current interpreting courses and what can be done to improve these courses?The author first reviews literature about interpreting competence and interpreting courses, in particular the competence for undergraduate students and its evaluation. After reviewing relevant studies, the paper comes up with an empirical design: the first part is an English-Chinese interpreting test, in which the author invites some T&I students and English major (EM) students from three universities (U1, U2, U3) to interpret an English passage into Chinese. In each university those selected T&I students have similar English competence as those selected EM students, and the number of students is large enough to be representative. After the test their interpretation is recorded and then scored by two groups of raters, one group rating message and the other rating delivery. The performance of T&I majors is then analyzed, with that of EM students as the reference. Before the test, the empirical design has been pilot tested in a university (U4), improved and then applied in U1, U2 and U3. The result shows that, in general, T&I students master some basic interpreting skills, but their language use lacks flexibility.Apart from the test, the empirical study also adopts other measures: survey, course analysis, and interview. The course analysis and interview show that T&I program places more emphasis on skill training than on language enhancement: on the one hand, there are a variety of interpreting classes and plenty of assignment, on the other hand, the quality and quantity of language classes are not satisfactory, which in the long term will hinder the development of interpreting competence. The author then gives suggestions on how to improve the current program so as to make those undergraduates qualified candidates for the interpreting training at postgraduate level.This paper is the first attempt to reveal the status quo of China's T&I undergraduates. It adopts survey, course analysis and interview to explore and triangulate the findings. These findings will be of relevance to interpreting teaching and training.