Essential Language Skills for Interpreters

About this course:

This is a required course for students who have passed the fluency exam and plan to enroll in the interpretation and translation certificate program.This course is designed for highly bilingual students to improve language skills in both languages and elevate proficiency to professional levels. Students in this course will work individually and in teams to tackle texts, drills and games with the objective of achieving higher and more sophisticated levels of expression, while closing proficiency gaps between both languages. This course strives to provide students with the language and cultural building blocks essential to be successful in the Mandarin-Chinese Interpretation certificate program. Programming - Readings in a broad range of topics, both in English and in Chinese. - Comprehension testing, writing drills and oral presentations. - Identifying cultural differences in communications. - Vocabulary building-blocks: learning roots and origins of words to build vocabulary. - Basic grammar drills in both languages. Review of common errors in both languages. - False cognates, idiomatic expressions and regionalisms in both languages. - Lateral thinking: conversion of concepts, parallel forms of expression, English to English and Chinese to Chinese.