Ginterpreting In Focus Group Discussion-Effort Model-Based Preparation Strategies

As an emerging form of interpreting growing along with China's rapid economic development, Focus Group Discussion (FGD) Interpreting, which falls into the broad category of simultaneous interpreting(SI), is becoming increasingly important and calls for immediate attention.The paper, based on the empirical studies of the author and theoretical contributions of Daniel Gile's Effort Model, aims to present a panoramic view of the working mechanism of FGD interpreting and explore the preparation strategies to maximize interpreter's total processing capacity.The preparation strategy for simultaneous interpreting is known as the most energy-consuming task in the interpreting field. Gile's work, Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training has divided preparation into three phases: advance, last-minute and in-conference preparation, but does not differentiate various preparation skills in disparate tasks and texts. Danica Seleskovitch said in her Interpreting For International Conferences: Problems of Language and Communication that sometimes preparation would take as long as the interpreting itself, while in some cases of SI a complex topic may demand huge amount of preparation workload which actually lasts days before the event, or probably even longer than the interpreting process per se. Long-term preparation and short-term preparation, by their definition, requires pertinent strategies. For long-term preparation, domestic researchers such as Baogang and Liu Heping mentioned a series of practice in interpreter training like paraphrasing, synonyms replacement, code conversion and topic drill, which fall into the larger category of daily or advance preparation. As for more urgent preparation strategies, or short-term preparation, the author focuses on maximizing the Listening and Analysis capacity, the Short-term Memory capacity, the Speech-production capacity and the Coordination capacity through individual skills and finally maximizing the Total Available Processing Capacity.It is expected that more attention be devoted to the research of non-traditional forms of interpreting, which will definitely contribute to the further development of interpreting study as a whole and better satisfy society's needs. Also, it is the wish of the author that more attention be paid to the preparation strategies of any interpreting task, which will surely facilitate the interpreting process and help bring about better results.