A Report On Whispered Interpreting

This report is based on this writer’s experience as a whisper interpreter at the Third International Conference on Existential Psychology and Third International Conference on Students’ Psychological Education & Counseling from June 12, 2014 to June 15, 2014(hereinafter refer to as ICEP). This writer provided two sessions of Chinese to English whispered interpreting service: a 40-minute relay whispered interpreting(French-Chinese-English) and a 30-minute consecutive-relay-whispered interpreting(French-Chinese-English) for a New Zealand expert Robert Shaw, one of the main speakers of ICEP. This writer also conducted two sessions of English to Chinese whispered interpreting for a psychotherapist from the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau, altogether95 minutes(60 minutes and 35 minutes respectively). There were several relatively short-time whispered interpreting practice, which are also the basis of this report but with no transcription attached.Within this report, a general description of the interpreting task was firstly given. This writer then gives a specific description of the interpreting process, including the pre-task preparation, the on-site interpreting, difficulties encountered as well as the tactics applied to tackle those difficulties. Then, the feedback from the clients and the writer’s own assessment on the whole interpreting process. Case analysis, which was based on the transcript of this writer’s whispered interpreting, is the major part of this report. In the case analysis, this writer listed some of the difficulties and challenges when fulfilling this whispered interpreting task. At last, some suggestions were put forward by this writer in order to address the above mentioned difficulties and challenges.In the case analysis, firstly, the difficulties and challenges of the general SI weregiven, such as the challenges in listening comprehension, the terminologies, the fast pace of the speech and the pressure as well as the nervousness from inside the novice interpreters.This author proposed some coping tactics as the strategies like omission, generalization,explanation and proper emotion control measures in the part of case analysis. Secondly, the specific difficulties and challenges of the whispered interpreting were shown in this report such as the intervention from the clients(sometimes the client may interrupt the interpreter to ask for further explanation), the intervention from the outside(the noise of other attendees in the conference hall) and the poor quality of the speech rendered by other interpreters under a relay interpreting circumstance. Also relevant coping tactics were provided by this writer in case analysis as coming early to the conference hall to pick a suitable site for whispering, talking to other relay interpreting interpreters before the task to get to know their interpreting style. At last, this writer discussed the influence of the slides used by the speakers as a tool of presentation. Therefore, this writer, on the basis of actual interpreting practice, analyzing the similarities and difference between simultaneous interpreting(or the often called conference interpreting) and whispered interpreting as well as showing some of the difficulties this writer encountered during the actual whispered interpreting process, so that suggestions can be provided to novice interpreters who are going to conduct a whispered interpreting or a relay-whispered interpreting.