Why Teach Simultaneous Interpretation Using English Texts? A Case Study of French and Korean

In conference settings that have Korean & French as official languages, more & more speakers prepare documents in English, while still speaking in either Korean or French. For Korean interpreters working at such conferences, the result is that they must perform simultaneous interpretation between Korean & French while referring to texts that are written in English. Two information streams - one oral & one visual - interact in three languages - Korean, French & English - to constitute quite extreme conditions of simultaneity & thus increases the interpreter's mental processing load. Furthermore, when an interpreter refers to an English text while listening to Korean discourse, s/he may be tempted to lean on the written text because of the syntactic similarities between English & French. This increases the risk of language interference between French - the interpreter's B language - & English, which is often not even the interpreter's C language. Though this is a problem that frequently arises in professional settings, simultaneous interpretation with English text is not dealt with in interpreter training programs. This paper utilizes an experiment with students in an interpreter training course to examine the needs associated with teaching this type of interpretation. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document