Intelligibility of the Chinese-Portuguese simultaneous interpretation in Macau

Abstract

The Portuguese language has an important role in Macau. In addition to the Chinese language, the Portuguese language must be used in the region's executive, legislative, and judicial services, as an official language of the Special Administrative Region of Macao. Thus, the Portuguese language is fundamental in the training of bilingual journalists, translators, and interpreters, to maintain a clear and open dialogue between the Chinese and Portuguese speaking communities. In this article, resulting from an extensive research work our objective is to present an overview analysis on the quality of Chinese-Portuguese simultaneous interpretation. It is presented the preliminary results and analysis that to us seemed to be the most important, resulting from a questionnaire with two groups of informants: i. 12 professional interpreters from Macao; ii. 11 Portuguese-speaking journalists. To assess Chinese-Portuguese interpretation quality, the suggestions of Bühler’s (1986) were followed. The collected data offers us a macro and micro perspective on assessing the quality of simultaneous interpretation. In this sense, we developed surveys, covering topics such as the overall quality of simultaneous interpretation, the most important criteria for interpreters their biggest challenges, techniques, and skills, as well as other opinions about simultaneous interpretation. When it comes to the quality, both groups consider it acceptable. It should also be noted that the four biggest challenges in Chinese/Portuguese simultaneous interpretation are idiomatic expressions, legal terminology, humor/jokes, and the translation of numbers. Among other results, we conclude that, for both groups of informants, knowledge of the target language and its linguistic-cultural aspects are the most important skills.