The Experimental Research Of Neural Machine Translation Used In The Preparation For English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

For a long period,the academic world has paid a lot of attention to preparation for interpretation.Ever since Deep Neural Network was used in translation in 2013,machine translation has progressed a lot and influenced human interpreters in many ways.The academic world starts to discuss more about its impacts.However,there seems to be little discussion about machine translation used in preparation for interpretation.Therefore,this paper would like to discuss the possibility and effects of Neural Machine Translation used in preparation for interpretation,and interpreters'attitude towards it.This paper first collects questionnaire from 75 students in Graduate Studies of Translation and Interpretation to understand their attitude towards Neural Machine Translation used in preparation before interpretation.Students were selected based on their performance in the latest English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting exam.The questionnaire shows that 68%of respondents have already used machine translation for preparation before interpretation in their past experiences and 93.33%of them would like to do so in the future.Student interpreters hold an open attitude towards machine translation.Second,this paper selects 14 student interpreters from 75 respondents to conduct an experiment,14 student interpreters are divided into two groups,7 into the experimental group,while another 7 into the control group.Subjects in experimental group can use machine translation for preparation before interpretation,while subjects in control group cannot.Their performances are graded according to the Grading Tool for Simultaneous Interpreting designed by Andrew Dawrant.Mistakes of google translation and of human interpreters are compared.After the experiment,the author also conducts an in-depth interview with subjects in experimental group.The result shows that when the material is moderately difficult and preparation time is limited,machine translation cannot save the preparation time of interpreters and cannot improve their interpretation performance.The interview results show that,most of the interpreters in Experimental Group consider machine translation does not save their time and hinder their interpreting performance.Their confidence towards machine translation are at a relatively low level after the experiment.