A Report On Videoconference Interpreting For The International Fencing Federation

As the rapid development of modern communication technology and new media,as well as the impact of the global pandemic,the International Fencing Federation Veterans Committee decided to take the annual conference online.This conference was held on January 22,2022,for a total of three hours.The author acted as an interpreter for the Chinese delegates and accompanied him in this meeting,recorded this interpreting and transcribed it into text for analysis.Compared with traditional offline interpreting practices,remote videoconferencing has the advantages of security,convenience,and travel cost savings,but it also poses many challenges for interpreters.By analyzing the interpreting record and transcribed text,the author found that the corpus’ difficulties during the interpreting process: firstly,it involved professional terms of fencing sports,which required the interpreter to prepare the terminology corpus in advance;secondly,the conference was conducted in the form of multi-person dialogues,with a large number of speakers from various countries worldwide,and the speeches with local accents,loose content,weak logic,which posed great challenges to the interpreters’ note taking,accent recognition and comprehension and memory;and finally,since the conference was an online videoconference,the conference process was accompanied by uncontrollable conditions such as instable network,unclear reception,and equipment problems,which brought psychological pressure to the interpreter.The report analyzes this interpreting practice with the Interpretive Theory as a theoretical guidance.The theory believes that interpreting means interpreting meaning,and the interpreter should pursue the reciprocity of the meaning of the original text rather than the linguistic units.The Interpretive Theory proposes a triangle model of interpreting,namely understanding,deverbalization and re-expression.Based on it,the author enumerates the difficulties encountered in this practice,using solution strategies such as paraphrasing,sentence pattern adjustment,logical analysis and information supplementation,which are combined with the Interpretive Theory.Finally,the author summarizes the main contents and limitations of this report,hoping to analyze her own experience to interpreters and provide some reference for similar video conference interpreting activities afterwards and improve quality of interpreting.