Reflection

As an English learner, I believe you must have had such an experience.

"Ah, you learn English?"

"Come on, let the people on TV say something,

You translate for me? "

It seems that after learning English, to outsiders, I suddenly became an omniscient translator. No matter how fast the speech is, no matter how complex the sentence patterns are, and no matter how rich the culture is, it can be automatically transcoded into another language and blurted out from the ears of English majors.

In fact, this myth about English majors is not uncommon. The problem is that we can fully expect this. Few people can be perfect except the Babel fish in the novel. Even professional simultaneous interpretation encounters unfamiliar fields, so it is impossible to keep pace and achieve complete accuracy and fluency.

However, this kind of impromptu examination is more like a handy form of expression than continuing to deify the interpretation ability of English majors. As an English major, once they don't perform well in this evaluation, they will get a hasty evaluation immediately:

"At this level."

"Eight-level white test?"

If you are a half-baked relative and friend, and deliberately make things difficult for you just to wait for your jokes, you can ignore them and refuse them as jokes. I am afraid that this kind of impromptu translation will appear in the job interview, so I have to deal with it carefully and rack my brains.

In a controversial job-hunting program, as a master of simultaneous interpretation at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, she didn't seem to hand in a satisfactory answer sheet in this examination.

The contestants are confident and generous, dressed in white professional suits, with exquisite makeup, introducing themselves smoothly and concisely, and clearly explaining the background information and job hunting intention.

Soon, the host began the first round of assessment and asked for simultaneous interpretation of a short but philosophical sentence.

Assuming that the player on the stage is you, how can you react quickly in a very short time?

(Moderator):

"Women rely on intuition and sense of smell;"

"Men always think they don't know."

"Wait until that woman is heartbroken;"

"Men feel that they are aware of this."

Comments: It is actually very difficult to clarify the logical relationship in this passage. There are many such sentences in Chinese, and several words are repeated several times. Although it is repetitive, it is also very interesting. The initial "intuition" and "sense of smell" also need to choose words carefully. If handled properly, it is not easy to make sentences fluent. The hardest part is rhyming. The last word of every short sentence is Fajue, which is very challenging.

The players quickly turned their heads and successfully completed the task of cross-passing. After a short pause, the host quickly gave a translation of each sentence.

(player):

"Ladies depend on feelings and emotions (and institutions),"

"What else? Men's wear You know, they don't have their intentions? And emotions. "

"But when they fall down crying,"

"What about those people? Feeling? Something about them. "

Don't watch the video, just look at the text and you can find the problem at a glance.

There is a deviation in understanding, and "intuition and smell" has become "feeling and emotion" in her interpretation.

The athlete made an amazing grammatical mistake. The simplest plural form including "men" is consistent with the subject and predicate of the sentence. Even considering the tension of coming to power, it also reflects that the basic skills are not solid to some extent.

Logical confusion. The continuous use of personal pronouns can easily give people an illusion of unclear reference.

Soon, a boss questioned her professional ability. It is believed that the original sentence is full of philosophy and has a certain sense of rhythm and interest, but simply translated into plain vernacular makes the original text look pale and powerless.

The second challenge began. She was asked to communicate directly with her boss in English and respond to the other party's questions about her English level.

Player: "I want to know what your job is? Is it? Doing it, which field are you involved in? "

Boss: "I am the boss of the English training school."

Player: "What kind of training?"

Boss: "We train from children to adults."

Player (blankly): "Sorry, I don't understand."

Boss: "Our students range from children to adults."

Player: "Children, you mean children? Son, not Cades. " (trying to correct pronunciation)

Boss (shocked, paused for a few seconds): "Yes, my pronunciation is not very good."

Player (chasing victory): "So are you picking my pronunciation or translation?"

Boss: "Yes, I am a manager, I am not a teacher."

Player: "But you must know your training." Right? "

The heated debate was forcibly interrupted by the host, and then the contestant said in his self-description that because of his professional relationship, he used to complete the translation task in a darkroom, but now he is sitting opposite the boss on the stage full of spotlights, which will inevitably affect his own play. If you close your eyes, you may be in better shape.

Seeing this, it seems that the subtext of the players is: "If sitting opposite you affected my mood, I wouldn't have made a fool of myself just now. As a translator, I have high requirements for the environment. " It really makes people laugh and cry.

Soon, the host agreed to her request, and the third round of closed-eye simultaneous interpretation exam officially began.

(Moderator):

"People say I pretend,"

"I said I don't pretend."

"He said that not pretending is also a kind of pretending."

"So am I faking it?"

Comments: This passage is the same as above, and the focus is also on logical relations. Especially in the third sentence, if you use English to repeat the same vocabulary as Chinese, it is actually a common expression.

(player):

"People think I am? Stupid. "

"But I'm not stupid, me? Do I pretend? Become someone else. "

"Another man said that not being someone else is not pretending."

"This is to pretend or not to pretend."

In the embarrassing comment session, a manager couldn't stand it anymore, and gave an example to answer directly, which won unanimous praise from other bosses present.

"People say I am pretentious."

"But I claim that I am not."

"They say you must be pretentious, even if you claim that you are not pretentious.

"So am I pretentious?"

Did the player translate "pretend" into "stupid"? It is a major deviation in understanding. I wonder if in just a few seconds, the classic drama of "others laugh at me too crazy, and I can't see through others" has been staged in my mind, and then it has been over-understood and translated into "stupidity". The last clause is no longer a correct English expression, but it can be said that it is unintelligible.

At the end of the program, the bosses carefully analyzed the career prospects of simultaneous interpretation for the contestants and provided her with career development suggestions as a mentor. In addition to pointing out her shortcomings, it also brings us a lot of thinking as an audience.

The so-called rice bowl is the skill of making a living. If you don't have a skill, you will soon be eliminated in the cruel competition in the market. With the expansion of colleges and universities, the number of students majoring in English, translation and simultaneous interpretation is huge every year. How to continuously improve their core competitiveness is a problem that every student needs to seriously consider.

Secondly, as the bosses in the program earnestly persuaded, we must recognize the gap between dreams and reality. Although most young people are confused, they can only look up at the stars with their feet on the ground.

Some bosses bluntly pointed out that the contestants basically failed to meet the professional requirements of simultaneous interpretation because their psychological quality was not too hard. Perhaps players can easily control the microphone in front of them in the darkroom, but excellent psychological quality is not only the basic requirement of simultaneous interpretation, but also the basic threshold of many other professions.

Like another graduate born in a British university, she is very generous. Standing in the center of the stage, there is even a bit of the temperament of the host. Like her predecessors, she also suffered from the difficulty of the host and asked for a translation: "All the beautiful women in the world are thin, only the imperial concubine is covered in meat" (I have thought for a long time how to translate o(╯□╰)o)

My sister had a brainwave and used free translation to meet this sudden challenge.

"No matter how many beautiful girls there are in the world, I just love my wife no matter how fat she is."

Even though her answer was not perfect, she solved the embarrassment of this sentence perfectly with a little cleverness and humor. From a certain point of view, even the ingenious rewriting of the original text makes this short sentence even sparkle with thoughts.

Perhaps in many cases, such flexibility and freedom is the most valuable part of translation. If such characteristics are combined to meet every hurdle and challenge in life, it will be much easier to go to school or apply for a job.

And you who love English.