Internship Report As An Interpreting Project Manager—Procedure Of Interpreting Project Management

The author worked in Be Link Trans, Guangzhou, as an intern in her spare time to assist the translation project manager in interpreting projects. Her major responsibilities included useful background information collection, interpreter contract signing, project summary writing and other relevant work. Due to this internship, the author managed to get more knowledge about the procedure of interpreting project management, standards of choosing right interpreters, quality control approaches and precautionary methods for possible emergencies. In addition, the author obtained a deeper understanding about interpreting market and a clearer picture about the major responsibilities of an interpreting project manager, thus realizing her shortcomings in this regard.Due to the fact that the interpreting projects the author had participated in were mostly small in scale, it was therefore decided that two interpreting projects, namely Project A The 2nd China-Asia-Pacific Logistic Communication and Cooperation Forum, and Project B China Office(Maryland) and American Companies South China Tour, were adopted to explain the whole procedure of interpreting project management.According to A Practical Guide to Translation Project Management, interpreting project management could be divided into four stages, and they are initiating, planning, executing and closing. To better illustrate each stage, Project A and Project B were partially adopted to do case studies. Specifically, Project B was used to do feasibility analysis which was an essential part of project initiating; in project planning, Project A was applied to analyze labor division and project schedule. However, as to related supporting resources and tools, Project B was chosen to do the explanation; in executing stage, Project A and B were complementarily used to present pre-task preparation, interpreter’s on-the-spot performance and disposal of emergencies; with regard to the closing part, Project A was adopted to describe the conclusion of a project, but it was Project B that served as basis for project evaluation. Even so, some steps and concepts were still not covered by this paper, for example, work breakdown structure and project management platform.In addition to analyzing the four stages one by one, the author also highlighted related management elements throughout the whole procedure, for instance, language asset management, human resource management and quality control.On the basis of this internship, the author put forward some unsolved problems in Belink’s interpreting project management such as updating interpreter information. Moreover, she shared inspiration and thoughts on future development, for example, concerning the fact that the market needed experienced interpreters and most student interpreters were lack of experience, the author expressed her opinions. It was hoped that this paper could shed some lights on students who wanted to enter into the interpreting market.