An Experimental Report Of Machine Translation Assisting Pre-interpreting Preparation Of Chinese-english Consecutive Interpreting

Pre-interpreting preparation has always been a topic of interest and research necessity in the interpreting field.With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology,deep neural networks have started to be used for translation.Machine translation has made remarkable breakthroughs and has influenced several aspects of interpretation for human interpreters,making it gradually become a topic of much discussion among scholars in the translation and interpretation field.However,there are still few studies on machine translation used in pre-interpreting preparation in academia.Therefore,this paper hopes to explore whether machine translation used in pre-interpreting preparation can significantly improve the quality of interpretation and the attitude of interpreters towards it.Firstly,questionnaires were used to collect the use of machine translation by28 postgraduate student interpreters majoring in English interpretation in Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.The pre-experiment questionnaire showed that almost all the students had used machine translation in their previous interpretation study and practice,and nearly half of them had used it to assist in pre-interpreting preparation;the post-experiment questionnaire showed that the majority of students were still willing to use machine translation to assist in pre-interpreting preparation in their future study,which indicated that most of the student interpreters hold a relatively open and tolerant attitude toward this method.Second,14 student interpreters of similar level from 28 student interpreters were selected based on the final grades of the Basic Interpretation Course for the experiment.They were randomly divided into an experimental group(7 student interpreters,35 paragraphs in total)that could use machine translation for pre-interpreting preparation and a control group(7 student interpreters,35 paragraphs in total)that could not use machine translation for pre-interpreting preparation.In this paper,the errors of the 14 student interpreters’ interpretations(70 paragraphs in total)were located by transcribing the interpreters’ recordings,and the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting performance of the two groups was quantitatively evaluated and analyzed by a professional statistical analysis software SPSS.The experimental results demonstrated that machine translation used in pre-interpreting preparation does not significantly improve the interpretation quality within the limited pre-interpreting preparation time.