HE Interpreter", Academy Award-winner Nicole Kidman's current movie project, needed the permission of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be shot in UN headquarters in New York.

"The Interpreter" will not only unveil real-life scenes in the UN, where real diplomats will be part of the movie it also gives Nicole Kidman the opportunity to unveil a new identity.

As the heroine of the movie, Kidman plays an interpreter who becomes involved in a series of assassinations and ends up a fugitive.

What is an interpreter? It is not hard for people to have an image of an interpreter's image in their minds. Nowadays, we see many on the television screen, in newspaper photographs and so on, but few understand how these people function and know little of the vital importance of their job.

Maybe director Sydney Pollack's explanation of the movie's plot can help us to know a little more about them. He says interpreters best know the sacred nature and the power of words. Interpreters believe that words have the same power as arms. But the hero in the movie, played by Sean Penn, another Academy Award-winner, ignores the interpreters' insistence on the correct use of words and this becomes the focus of the movie.

Significant role

Apart from Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, the movie reminds us that the interpreters play a special role in the world today, especially on those stages where significant international affairs are happening. In general terms, an interpreter can be viewed merely as a translator. But interpreters go further than translators who deal in written works - they deal with the spoken word.

There are two ways of interpreting: "consecutive" and "simultaneous". In consecutive interpreting the speaker stops every few minutes (usually at the end of every "paragraph" or completed thought) and the interpreter then steps forward to render what was said into the target language. In simultaneous interpreting, the most popular form, the interpreter sits in a booth wearing headphones and talks into a microphone as the speaker makes his or her points. There's no stopping in simultaneous interpreting and interpreters need to be translating a sentence for their audience into the target language while simultaneously listening to, and comprehending, the next sentence.

One can see the difficulty of the task even if you are monolingual: just try paraphrasing someone's speech with a half-sentence delay, making sure you understand the next sentence while paraphrasing the previous one. Besides this, both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting require that the interpreter have a vast knowledge of the cultural background of the source language and professional knowledge of the subject matter that needs to be interpreted.

It's obviously hard to train to become a professional interpreter because of the rigorous requirements and there are not many of them around.

Professional simultaneous interpreters are regarded as "the most-wanted professionals of the 21st century".

Although there is a great demand for interpreters, until recently their testing and certification system, especially simultaneous interpreters, was far from satisfactory. The system greatly improved with the founding of the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT) in the Shanghai International Studies University on September 2 last year.

Professor Xie Tianzhen, the head of the Translation Studies School at GIIT, said that before the institute was founded, the academics in charge of setting it up visited the interpretation and translation institutes and faculties at the University of Barcelona and the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle. The GIIT adopted the course design of the two universities.

The ancient Chinese used to think they occupied the centre of the world, especially when it came to culture and to learn or speak foreign languages was not advocated by most of the intellectuals in those times. So the upper-class intellectuals ignored the merit of having translators and interpreters.

But in the West many centuries ago, interpreters and translators were rather respected and their training was well advanced. In the Middle Ages a celebrated School of Translation already existed in Toledo, Spain and the standard interpreters and translators had to reach also derived from the Western education tradition. So it was inevitable today that the same training methods and standards are taken from the West.

The major course in the GIIT is conference interpreting and it is the focus project of the "Tenth Five-Year Topical Plan". It's also the only national base for the training of simultaneous interpreters approved by the Ministry of Education and it is the first course in China designed in accordance with the specific requirements of the Training Committee of the International Association of Conference Interpreters. In order to provide excellent conference simulations, the institute has set up a first-class simulated meeting room which includes eight sound-proof booths. It was described as the "Rolls-Royce" of the simulated meeting rooms by Marco Benedetti, the European Union's Director-General for Interpretation.

The course is in two parts and covers interpretation training, both consecutive and simultaneous, and is equivalent to a Master's degree course. The students who graduate from GIIT have the option of going for two types of certificates - a Professional Diploma in Conference Interpreting or a MA degree. The former can only be issued to those who have passed the test for conference interpreting which is conducted by an international examination board.

At GIIT last year, after the first round of tough admission tests, 10 students were admitted to the course, the first such group of students in China. Some already had MA degrees and some had worked for a long time. Why did this new institute have so much attraction for them?

In money terms, the payment for interpreters is considerably high, at present. The hourly rate for a simultaneous interpreter who works in the UN is US$300 and in Shanghai, it's over 2,400 yuan. The high hourly rate gives you a relatively free and easy lifestyle, you know. It's also very common among interpreters to be a freelancer.

Xu Jitao