| Interpreting Blog |
| Kathie Lao |
| 13 October 2021 |
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| Event: Gender, Power and Agency in interpreting: How is the image of interpreters represented by Chinese media? |
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| On 8 October, I’ve done something I haven’t tried before – being a student interpreter for an academic talk. From preparation to the “warfare”, I’ve experienced the tremendous pressure every interpreter may face. |
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| After Veronica (my partner) and I received the journal article and the draft PPT that Prof. Wang was going to present, we started to work on the glossary. The preparation of glossary went well. But then vocabularies should be revised every day to keep my memories fresh, as there was no time to scroll through the glossary to find the right word in the split second. |
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| Since the professional talk was held in Zoom, Ms Jiang held a training session with the four of us to test if there’d be any technical problems. It turned out that I couldn’t join the interpreting channel, but luckily the problem was solved with Andy’s help, the technician of our department. Besides, my partner and I could not hear each other’s voice, so we had to be careful not to speak at the same time. |
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| Interpreting was hard; interpreting for an academic talk was harder. Knowing that there were over 200 attendees just five minutes before the talk started, I felt a great deal of pressure. The absence of confidence was the foremost obstacle. At the beginning of my turn, I was too nervous to speak at a good pace. But after I got used to the environment, I got back on track. Overall, I rated myself 6.5 out of 10, as sometimes I couldn’t catch up with the speaker and I had difficulty in translating jargons. I need more practice! |
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| Lastly, I was grateful to have this opportunity to learn from Prof. Binhua Wang and Dr. Nancy Tsai. The presentation and Q&A section was full of wisdom and insight. |
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