Interpreting Project For Training Program By An Expert From Evergreen Community School (U.S.)

This project report is based on the interpreting task undertaken in 2016 for the training program by an expert from the Evergreen Community School (U.S.) offered to preschool educators in Nanjing. The topics covered in the lecture include a brief introduction to preschool educational concepts in the U.S., tradition and features of the Evergreen Community School, children' s way-of-thinking education, game-based teaching methodology. Participants to the training program are principals and teacher representatives from local kindergartens in Nanjing. On the basis of surveying the interpreting, this report presents three key issues or difficulties involved in this project.First, the speaker is an expert from the American educational community, whose expertise,educational philosophy and national/regional identity generate difficulties in terms of unfamiliarity and novelty. In particular, her game-based teaching ideas and methods for the development of an effective way of thinking among preschoolers are accompanied with a large number of special terms and expressions. Second, preschool educational training has its own features, such as the demonstration feature, performance feature, and impromptu feature. The speaker can choose to play video clips, perform musical pieces, and adjust speech content on the spot to cater to the participants' needs. These will pose a great challenge to the interpreter. Third, the difficulty of the training material, the cognitive habits of the participants, as well as cultural and linguistic differences between the western speaker and the Chinese participants will increase the processing burden for the interpreter,resulting in higher stress level during the interpreting process.In response to the above-mentioned difficulties, the author of this report borrows from relevant theories and methodologies in interpreting research, and extracts representative source-language and target-language segments from transcripts of the interpreting, so as to perform case study in the form of discourse analysis, data analysis, and interpreter's behavior observation for presenting the following suggested solutions. First, the interpreter should build a terminology database prior to the interpreting task, collect the speaker's historical discourse and video/audio profile, keep contact with the speaker to understand his/her decision about the actual utterance. Second, the interpreter should adopt multiple identities during the training, such as interpreter, mediator, and coordinator, instead of merely acting as an "invisible" outsider. The interpreter should also take measures to cope with unpredicted situations, such as prolonged consecutive interpreting without taking notes, addition and reduction in interpreting, generalization, and body language. Third, by increasing familiarity with the interpreting task and intensifying pre-task preparation, the interpreter can reduce the stress level. By improving prediction ability and understanding cultural and linguistic difference between the speaker and the participants, the interpreter can work with less pressure thanks to better communication among the stake-holders of the training program. This report, together with the three recommended solutions, can be generalized to a certain extent as to benefit people in the field of preschool educational training by expanding the research scope and informing staff and interpreters in similar situations.