Nearly finished semester 1!!
I've nearly finished semester 1!! Hooray! Here are my impressions...
Interpreting: It's very very hard. Some weeks it goes well and some weeks it goes terribly. I find it really hard to tell how well I'm doing. Today in J->E simultaneous I thought I'd done awfully but my feedback from the teacher wasn't too bad so that was nice. Everyone found today hard though. I'll definitely be going into the interpreting lab tomorrow to practice more...
Consecutive is also pretty hard. Sometimes my notes are beautiful and I totally understand what's going on, but when speeches get more complicated and you have to think harder to understand what the speaker is saying it all goes a bit wrong. For example, we had to consecutively interpret a Japanese speech on smoking last week and I had one part of my notes which was Dev C (stands for developing countries) 15 1/3. I have no idea what it meant. I was just writing down random things.
This week we did an English speech by Han Seung-soo about his work with climate change and that was very very hard. Sophisticated vocabulary and ridiculously long sentences. All of us struggled and we had to go over sections 2-3 times before we got it. There was one section that was something like "The Cancun Accord barely managed to salvage the multilateral UN climate process which was perilously tattered from the hangover of Copenhagen in '09". Lucky me, I got that section to interpret and had no clue what to do with it. What I came up with was a mess that made no sense :( Oh well!
Translation: Japanese to English I'm not bad at. English to Japanese I'm not very good at. That is in two translations (business and finance) I did poorly and in the last one we did (legal) I actually did ok :D One problem is that I've never had to write anything in Japanese except emails to friends and family so suddenly trying to write formally is quite difficult. Nevermind, next semester I'll only be doing J-E translation and instead of E-J I'll be doing Tools and Technology in Translation.
Interpreting: It's very very hard. Some weeks it goes well and some weeks it goes terribly. I find it really hard to tell how well I'm doing. Today in J->E simultaneous I thought I'd done awfully but my feedback from the teacher wasn't too bad so that was nice. Everyone found today hard though. I'll definitely be going into the interpreting lab tomorrow to practice more...
Consecutive is also pretty hard. Sometimes my notes are beautiful and I totally understand what's going on, but when speeches get more complicated and you have to think harder to understand what the speaker is saying it all goes a bit wrong. For example, we had to consecutively interpret a Japanese speech on smoking last week and I had one part of my notes which was Dev C (stands for developing countries) 15 1/3. I have no idea what it meant. I was just writing down random things.
This week we did an English speech by Han Seung-soo about his work with climate change and that was very very hard. Sophisticated vocabulary and ridiculously long sentences. All of us struggled and we had to go over sections 2-3 times before we got it. There was one section that was something like "The Cancun Accord barely managed to salvage the multilateral UN climate process which was perilously tattered from the hangover of Copenhagen in '09". Lucky me, I got that section to interpret and had no clue what to do with it. What I came up with was a mess that made no sense :( Oh well!
Translation: Japanese to English I'm not bad at. English to Japanese I'm not very good at. That is in two translations (business and finance) I did poorly and in the last one we did (legal) I actually did ok :D One problem is that I've never had to write anything in Japanese except emails to friends and family so suddenly trying to write formally is quite difficult. Nevermind, next semester I'll only be doing J-E translation and instead of E-J I'll be doing Tools and Technology in Translation.