A Comparative Study Of Student And Professional Interpreters' Sight Translation Performances

Sight translation is practiced by interpreters and is taught as education.During the training,teachers usually provide instructions based on their own experience.This paper presents the findings of the study comparing ten student interpreters' and six professional interpreters' sight translation of two English speeches into Chinese.The paper examines their sight translation performances in terms of delivery,accuracy and target language quality and adopts both qualitative and quantitative researches.It also points out strategies that should be learnt by students.According to the thesis,the biggest two differences between student interpreters and professional interpreters are their delivery and target language quality.Accuracy is not the major element to differentiate,but students still need to reduce minor errors.Overall,the average delivery speed of professionals is higher than students.While professional interpreters' major accuracy errors were restricted to challenging sentences,student interpreters' major errors were spread throughout the text.Strategies,such as segmentation,addition and reduction,are effective to enhance delivery and target language quality.The results indicate that students need to distinguish primary ideas from secondary ideas and make conscious efforts to distance themselves from the source language form and avoid literal translation.These findings have pedagogical inspirations for sight translation training.