At 8:20 am on October 27th, 2017, the school-level 7th Cross-Strait Interpreting Competition, organized by School of Foreign Languages of SNNU, was successfully held in the conference room of the School. The judges of the competition were teachers of the School, Lyu Minhong, Ma Ke, Gao Fen, Cao Linying, and Chao Yue , and Yang Dongmin acted as the scoring supervisor.
The competition included two parts, theme interpreting and conference interpreting. In the theme interpreting section, contestants should first listen to a Chinese speech and an English speech (each about 40 seconds in length respectively), and use the target language to describe the main content within 30 seconds without taking notes. In the conference interpreting section, contestants should first listen to a Chinese discourse and interpret into English, and an English-Chinese interpreting task is followed. The English discourse and the Chinese discourse were one minute in length respectively, and contestants were given 1.5 minutes to finish their interpreting.
A total of 24 contestants signed up for the contest. After the host announced the format, requirements and discipline of the competition, a contest between interpreters was officially kicked off. During the competition, contestants made their best performance in response to the questions with their solid bilingual background. In the theme interpreting section, contestants retold the information they had heard in the target language by virtue of their excellent short-term memory skills. In the conference interpreting section, the contestants used their notes to quickly organize their language through agile thinking, and won the judges' approval with their clear pronunciation as well as standard and professional language, which also impressed the audience. The judges attentively listened to the interpreting of the contestants and gave each contestant fair and authoritative grades according to the scoring rules. After the competition, Ms. Lyu Minhong, on behalf of all the judges, commented on the merits and inadequacies of the contestants, and encouraged thems to continue the efforts to improve their language skills, enhance the ability to use language and pay attention to cultivating the professional qualities of an interpreter. In the end, Ms. Ma Lan, Deputy Secretary of the School joined with the judges to give the awards and prizes to the winners. Finally, the conference ended with a warm applause.
After the fierce competition of the contestants, Chen Xinran and Dang Dandan won the first prize; Li Yuan and other four students won the second prize; Yang Man and other seven students won the third prize, and Hu Xin and other eight students won the honorable prize. Among them, the two students who won the first prize will represent SNNU to participate in the 7th Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest—the Northwest Region Competition held in Xi'an International Studies University on November 4th.
The contest provided a good platform for students to learn and communicate in interpreting, and to show their abilities and expertise. The contest was conducive to stimulating the students' enthusiasm for learning interpreting skills, so that they would have a definite objective in the future learning, improve capabilities of language learning and bilingual transformation and application. Wish our school students achieve outstanding grades in the next contest!
(Translated by YANG Dongmin)
