I’m a half Chinese half American woman who grew up in the states (Virginia) and have been living in Taipei for the past 4 years. Although English is my mother tongue, I also grew up speaking (simple) Chinese in the house with my mother. Coming to Taiwan has really enhanced my Chinese verbal and listening skills. I currently work as a voice recorder but I would really like to find work that would take advantage of both my English and Chinese abilities. I don’t know much about the field of interpreting but I would really like to learn. If any of you are professional interpreters, and would be kind enough to teach a newbie the ropes, I would really appreciate it. Thank you! 
I am not really a professional interpreter, but I have done consecutive interpeting and got paid for it. Next time I have such a job, you can come along and observe. I had a go at simultaneous interpreting in the Philippines, but I have not been trained for it.
That would be great, Juba. Thanks!
Also, do you know what kind of training is available for this kind of thing?
Rachel, pm Ironlady on these boards. She is a graduate of the Fujen translation/interpretation program. Shida also has a program.
Rachel, pm Ironlady on these boards. She is a graduate of the Fujen translation/interpretation program. Shida also has a program.
Thanks Feiren, I’ll do that!
Chinese Culture University has a 3 months interpretation class. That might be a good start?
I’ll look into that, Miso. Thank you! Do you happen to know if I need to meet certian academic requirements in order to take that course?
Hi Rachel,
I did the 3-month course at CCU a number of years before doing the MA at Fujen.
The only qualification for getting into CCU is money. Quite a lot of money, in fact.
To be honest, since the quality of teachers has plummetted at CCU (in the “good old days” we had actual AIIC members teaching there!) I don’t recommend it. Lots of filler in the course, and like all the local offerings (no offense, just the facts) they are tailored for those learning English, not those perfecting their Chinese. (Wait till you get to the “accent improvement” class – it’s a hoot.)
Hook up with some serious first- or preferably second-year interpreting students. You will be a commodity for an interpreting sparring partner in Taiwan as you are a native English speaker. I’m sure anyone preparing for the professional exam at Fujen or Shita would be happy to practice with you. Ask them a few questions (try to find someone who has actually been taught how to take notes in a principled way – and good luck with that these days) and practice, practice, practice.
Remember, too, the golden rule for consecutive: your rendition should take only 2/3 as long as the original speaker’s, while not leaving anything out. They used to time us with a stopwatch at Fujen, and it’s good training. I can’t stand it when I have to work with some of the untrained “I’ll just repeat this again because I don’t feel secure with myself” interpreters in the US who take up to double the time the speaker took… :fume:
Basic thing to practice is short CI without notes. Train your memory. If you get to where you can pretty much interpret a 1 minute segment without notes and without leaving out anything important, that will be a fantastic basis for any future endeavors.
Entrance exams for MA programs are a different story, and it’s hard to predict what direction of preparation would be helpful. Best thing to do would be to dredge up foreigners currently in the programs to see what direction the exams have taken in recent years.
HTH
Terry
ironlady,
can you elaborate on what you mean by taking notes in a principled way?
Thank you Ironlady for all your advice! 
In re: notetaking for consecutive interpreting:
In the “good old days”, teachers would teach some basic principles for taking CI notes (basically – one idea per line (kill a tree), indent to show logical relationships, and use symbols; notes are intended only to jog your memory [primacy of memory, not notes] and should not be laboriously decoded). Students need to make up their own symbols or determine how much text and in which language was optimal for their own way of working, but generally folks stuck to the basic principles because they work.
I was originally taught CI notetaking by Liu Minhua, who is an AIIC member and used to teach notetaking at both Fujen and CCU. Nowadays, though, after doing her Ph.D. in the States, she’s had a conversion of some sort and believes that everyone should just ‘figure out’ the best way of taking notes for themselves. From what I saw with the difference between my notetaking and delivery rates and those of my classmates, who had all the same teachers at Fujen (including the post-conversion Liu Minhua who had taught me pre-conversion at CCU), and acknowledging that there were other differences as well, it seems that my having been taught to take notes in the traditional way was a big benefit to me in CI. If I had problems, they were language-related, not memory or note related.
Liu Minhua had written a book about the subject in Chinese some years back, which is now out of print. I’ve got a copy somewhere but I can’t for the life of me put my hand on it just now, or I’d ask her if I could send you a copy.
I think if you talk to most interpreting MA students, you’ll hear that notetaking is a problem for them. Many complain they don’t know “how” to do it. The best advice I have is to practice taking notes in your native language first, and think about “general concepts” – ideas or things that come up all the time, no matter what subject you’re interpreting about. I have hard (permanent) symbols for logical relationships, temporal relationships, and common ideas like “development”, “international”, “Taiwan”, “cross-Strait”, etc. etc. so that I never have to stop and think about how to represent these ideas if I want to write them down in CI. You then develop “soft” (temporary) symbols for any given job, which might have a particular meaning only for the duration of that job. Traditionally a triangle was used to mean “the topic of today’s conference or meeting” – same idea.
I could go on for hours, but I’ll spare you. 
Wow, Ironlady, I had always known that proper note taking is important. But I think you’ve made it into an art form. You’re my hero 
yup, many thanks for the info.
when i get a chance i’ll take a look online and see if i can find something similar.
maybe a tutorial or something.