A Study On Current Interpretation Teaching In Chinese Universities

The teaching of interpretation is totally different from the teaching of languages and translation. It should conform to its own teaching methods and principles, embody the interpretation characteristics, and equip students with the qualities a qualified interpreter possesses. In this connection, this paper firstly elaborates the interpretation characteristics in accordance with the interpreter's work experience. Then, theories of interpretation teaching are systematically reviewed and introduced in this paper.What is the actual situation of Chinese interpretation teaching at present? Bearing this question in mind, this author has found that Chinese research on interpretation teaching has just made a start and a lot of inadequacies have still existed in the actual teaching practice. In order to probe deeper into this field, the author conducted a small-scale survey through the "review" and "questionnaire" which was designed by herself according to her limited working experience in a translation company in charge of the interpretation group and peculiar interpretation teaching theories. It mainly makes a general survey of the teaching content, the teaching means and the extracurricular activities of interpretation teaching. Finally, on the basis of the results, the author put forward some tentative and detailed suggestions on how to improve the interpretation teaching. Due to the specialness of the respondents, who have both interpreting theories and work experience with them, the result is much more convincing than other surveys which only investigate the students; and this becomes the strongpoint of this paper.The paper consists five chapters. Chapter I puts forward the types and features of interpretation, by comparing it with translation to show the reader the uniqueness of interpretation. The next chapter lists the three famous theories of interpretation teaching both at home and abroad from the Seleskovitch's theory to Gile's and at last the Xiada's theory, which leads to the conclusion that skill training is of great importance in interpretation teaching, which will be elaborated in detail in Chapter III. Chapter III is generally divided into two parts, language-related skills (including note-taking, listening training, comprehension and memory training), and non-linguistic knowledge (responsibility, quick response and peculiar characteristics of the interpreter. The following chapter is the most important one in this paper. The author designed questions in accordance with the third chapter's main argument and analyzed the answers. The detailed statistics in the tables showed the problems existing in today's interpretation teaching. The last chapter elaborates the results in the investigation and finds out the problems to analyze, and by the knowledge of various books and papers that author had read and some working experience, some suggestions are given to deal with the problems. The efforts are expected to bring due attention to the mastering of basic language knowledge. This paper's most important concern is to emphasize that the acquisition of a foreign language is not just a matter of learning its grammar and piling up the vocabulary.