A Report On The Simulated Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting Of Ecology And Environment Minister Li Ganjie’s Press Conference At The Second Session Of The Thirteenth National People’s Congress

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing the international community.Countries around the world are exploring ways to address environmental issues and China has been actively participating in global environmental governance.The annual "two sessions" of China provide an important window for the world to know Chinese policies and Chinese proposals,where interpreters play a big role.The quality of interpreters’interpretation greatly affects the effectiveness and quality of China’s foreign-oriented publicity work.Hence,the author chose Li Ganjie’s Press Conference of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on March 11th,2019 during the Second Session of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress as the simulated Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting material with the duration about 106 minutes.The author hopes to accumulate experience in diplomatic interpreting and summarize interpreting difficulties and corresponding interpreting strategies through the simulated simultaneous interpreting task so as to provide certain references for other interpreters and interpreting learners,thereby helping to improve the interpretation quality.The whole process of the simulated interpreting task is recorded in this report,including pre-interpreting preparation,interpreting implementation and postinterpreting evaluation and reflection.The author has accomplished the interpreting task smoothly under the guidance of skopos theory and successfully coped with several interpreting difficulties by employing corresponding interpreting strategies.Skopos theory(skopostheorie)is the core of functionalist translation theories that emphasizes translation is a purposeful activity and the skopos or purpose of the translation determines the choice of translation strategies the translator used in the translation and ultimately affects the effect and quality of the translation.The three rules of skopos theory can guide the interpreter efficiently to give his or her subjective initiative into full play to employ corresponding interpreting strategies according to the purpose of the translation in order to render an acceptable,easyto-understand and high-quality interpretation.This report consists of five chapters.Chapter One gives a brief introduction to the background,features and objectives of the simulated interpreting task.Chapter Two describes the pre-interpreting preparation,the interpreting implementation and the post-interpreting evaluation of the interpreting practice.Chapter Three states the theoretical foundation of the interpreting practice.The emergence and development of skopos theory,the three rules of skopos theory and the applicability of skopos theory in diplomatic interpreting are introduced in this chapter.Chapter Four is a concrete analysis of the interpreting difficulties in the interpreting practice and corresponding interpreting strategies.The first part of this chapter sums up five types of interpreting difficulties encountered by the author in the interpreting process,including the interpretation of policy-related words,the interpretation of Chinese abbreviations,the interpretation of culture-loaded words,the interpretation of incomplete sentences and the interpretation of parallel structures.And the second part presents the corresponding interpreting strategies,that is,simplification,wordfor-word translation and omission,literal translation,liberal translation and idiomatic translation,addition and reformulation.Furthermore,the author presents some typical examples to analyse how and why she adopted the interpreting strategies under the guidance of skopos theory and demonstrates the intended communicative effect.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this report,including findings and limitations of this interpreting practice and implications for future interpreting learning.The author summarizes the following points after this simulated interpreting practice:1.The flexibility of diplomatic interpreting is relatively low,in which literal translation strategies such as word-for-word translation are used more often.When interpreting culture-loaded words,the interpreter tends to choose liberal translation strategies such as explanation with a view to achieving the communicative purpose.2.The fidelity and coherence of the interpretation often contradict with each other.The interpreter should first strive to produce an understandable and fluent interpretation for the target audience and achieve the intended purpose of the interpreting,then consider being faithful to the original language to the greatest extent.3.The use of omission,segmentation and other interpreting strategies should be considered in the light of the circumstances.On the one hand,those strategies help interpreters produce more effective information and improve the interpreting efficiency.On the other hand,they may violate the faithfulness of the target language to the source language and damage the coherence of the interpretation.