A Study of Undergraduate Education of Simultaneous Interpretation: With Special Emphasis on the Performance Moving from English into Korean

Abstract

This study aims to determine speech texts appropriate for teaching simultaneous interpretation in undergraduate program, particularly from English into Korean. In order to find a more efficient type of text to train undergraduate majors, performance data was collected and analyzed for two levels of texts: official speech text (OST) and unofficial speech text (UST). The findings of the study show: the rate of interpreting disruptions stood at 54% in the case of OST and 35% for UST. These figures indicate that there was a big difference in the rate of errors and omissions between OST and UST. Interpreters waited in varying degrees while interpreting complex sentences, perhaps because of the long gap between the subject and the clausal complement. In view of the level of interpretation disruptions, official speech texts, which basically are loaded with difficult sentence patterns, need to be kept to the minimum while teaching simultaneous interpretation to undergraduate interpretation majors. As a preferable alternative, UST texts, which are basically loaded with easier structures, will provide the students with quality education.