2025 Winter Research Program

Project title: 

Professional conference interpreters’ use of interpreting strategies in real-life Chinese/English simultaneous interpreting at the United Nations

Hours of engagement & delivery mode

36 hrs per week for 4 weeks (30 June – 25 July 2025).

The project will be offered through a hybrid arrangement, namely a combination of on-site and remote modes. 

Description:

A comprehensive overview of the project:

This empirical research project bridges a salient gap in the existing interpreting studies literature. It aims to explore what effective interpreting strategies highly skilled professional conference interpreters employ when doing simultaneous interpreting work for the United Nations.

Background: Simultaneous interpreting is a highly challenging cognitive and linguistic activity in which an interpreter listens to a source speech (e.g., an English speech by the prime minister of Australia) and at the same time produces the messages in the target language (e.g., English or Japanese). Simultaneous interpreting at international conferences represents the highest level of interpreting work for practitioners in the translation and interpreting profession. In contrast to the large body of research on translation, there has been a dearth of empirical research on real-life conference interpreting. Such research is significant in that knowing how professional conference interpreters cope with interpreting difficulties in real-life simultaneous interpreting work can inform interpreting students about how to deal with challenges and solve problems during simultaneous interpreting practice, which is often quite stressful and difficult for students.

Hypotheses:

1. Professional conference interpreters use a wide variety of interpreting strategies such as making strategic omissions, producing explicitations, adjusting time lag and summarising information to deal with language-pair specific difficulties during authentic simultaneous interpreting.
2. Professional conference interpreters employ different strategies when interpreting in different directions. In other words, their interpreting strategies in English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting differ considerably from those in Chinese-to-English simultaneous interpreting.

Research method:

Professional conference interpreters’ real-life Chinese/English simultaneous interpretation videos or audios will be downloaded from the United Nations websites. The videos or audios will be transcribed verbatim to obtain transcripts of the source language speeches and target language speeches.

The source language speeches will be compared with the target language speeches sentence by sentence to identify what effective interpreting strategies the interpreters adopted to overcome interpreting difficulties and produce accurate simultaneous interpretations under much stress. The various interpreting strategies will be categorised and representative examples will be selected for in-depth analysis.

Moreover, interpreting strategies for English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting will be compared with interpreting strategies for Chinese-to-English simultaneous interpreting to see if there are any differences in terms of category and frequency.

Expected learning outcomes and deliverables:

Applicants will gain skills and receive training in data collection, be trained to conduct data analysis of simultaneous interpretation data and may have an opportunity to generate publications from the research depending on their research abilities, the quality of their research work and their dedication.

Suitable for:

This project is open to applications from undergraduate and postgraduate students with high proficiency in both English and Chinese.

Primary Supervisor:

Dr Lily Wang

Further info:

The supervisor wishes to be contacted by students prior to submitting an application. Email: j.wang7@uq.edu.au