TALKING THE TALK

A contest for foreign language majors offers future interpretation professionals the chance to respond to real-world situations, Zhou Wenting reports.

Students majoring in foreign languages at 22 Chinese universities gathered in Shanghai for the Friendly Contest for Multilingual Simultaneous Interpretation on Sept 4, in a bid to prepare future translation professionals with real-life situations and experiences.

During the contest, which was hosted by the Shanghai International Studies University and the first of its kind to be held in the country, English majors interpreted the dialogue from a real-time English video into Chinese, while their schoolmates majoring in the Japanese, Korean, and Arabic interpreted the Chinese into their specialist languages.