United Nations, The Chinese Booth

Yamaha audience our home were like the a-team war sure jawan sound Ocoee good afternoon my name is Xiao Hong Chan and I am from Beijing China and I work as an interpreter in the Chinese booth as I understand there are a lot of young people who are interested in this profession of interpretation at least that's true in my country and they would like to know like what is going on in there what kind of training you may need maybe I can speak a little bit about my own experience and I was an English major in

college I studied in Beijing Foreign Studies University for four years and right after that I took a competitive exam nationwide to get myself into this UN language training program and the program was for two years and we had the first year doing consecutive interpretation and the second year simultaneous interpretation and after the first year they gave you a very hard exam to decide whether you want to you can be a translator or an interpreter so as you can tell I was successful so I became an interpreter and I after a graduation from the program I

worked as a freelance interpreter in the Chinese market for five years and after that I came to the states to study as a graduate student I did two years of political science and two years of MBA and then I worked for city bank for five years I don't know why I had took a long road finally I came back to the United Nations in 2004 and let me tell you a little bit about my work here at the United Nations I work in the Chinese booth and we have in New York around twenty four twenty

five people or together doing this interpretation work in the Chinese booth and out of these people only one is doing from Chinese into French and French into Chinese and everybody else is doing English into Chinese or Chinese into English how do we do it like normally we work in a team of three and every morning or every afternoon we get in and we decide who to start and how do we decide that we draw lucky draws whoever gets the first one we'll start on the dot from zero to 20 and the second one will be

from 20 to 40 and the third one from 40 to zero so basically you know if you happen to be one you have to be sure that you are in the booth during your work every hour from zero to 20 and then since we do English into Chinese more in most cases because as you can imagine there's only one dedication normally who speak who would speak in Chinese right so when there is this Chinese speaking we have to do that into English and whoever gets three will do that because that means he or she will

have more time to prepare that's normally when you have a script and that's how it works but if it's like a spontaneous speech whoever gets it in their round would do it and since we and nobody else would know nobody else in the other booths would speak would understand Chinese so when we do from Chinese into English then our English becomes the like the relay like other booths we'll pick up our English and interpret that into their own languages except for the English booths they can rest and have a good time of course what else

do we need to say I think you know being interpreted of interpreter is a very challenging job it's stressful but it is also fulfilling because you feel you are the bridge helping people with the communication and also my friends who know I'm a simultaneous interpreter working in the United Nations they think of a genius but actually I'm not it's just you know hard work and a lot of preparation before the meet and doing summary and a sort of review after work and you know you need to accumulate a lot of vocabulary a lot of experiences

in order to be a better interpreter there's always room for improvement thank you