1 My Reflection of the Interpreting Course Its really lucky for me to have taken the course of interpreting skills this term by Ms Yu, because this course really benefits me a lot. Above all, my listening skills have been improved to a much higher level than before through interpreting learning. We all know that, without a good listening to catch what the speakers say in source language, it would be impossible for us interpreters to transform it into the target language. Listening is the first and primary step for English learners to be a good interpreter. Keeping this realization in the mind, I pay my special attention to the study of listening. In the class, the routine of news listening always reminds me of the importance of listening towards this course.Nowadays, I have less difficulty in understanding what foreigners say in daily life. I can still follow speakers without referring to the Chinese translation when I watch movies. It is the Interpreting Course that pushes me to listen to English every day so as to avoid being rusty on the skills. I appreciate this class, not only because it helps to improve my listening ability, but also it makes me form a habit of listening to English every day. We are not English native speakers, so it is preeminently important for us learners to listen to it all the time so that we can immense ourselves in the atmosphere surrounded by English language. In the following days, the good habit will continue to accompany me. Keep listening, and I believe one day my listening skills will reach the level that a qualified interpreter should do. Another benefit I have got from the class is the improvement of my spoken English. Admittedly, an interpreter must be bilingually capable of not only listening but also speaking. Interpreting requires you to express in target language what youve got from the source language on the basis of understanding. In this sense, only being a good listener is not enough at all. When I knew the fact in the first class of this course, I really felt a big challenge in front of me. Spoken English was always my strongest weakness. Each time I tried to speak out English, the poor pronunciation and intonation can not be endured even by myself, still less by my listeners. So I chose to shut up my mouth. Avoid speaking it and then you would avoid discomfort and being frustrated by it, which was always the way I used to comfort myself before taking the 2 class. However, things change now. The Interpreting Course is different from the courses we have learned before. In the class of listening, reading, grammar and writing, most of the time is spent listening to the teachers speech and no one will blame you if you choose to be silent. In this course, however, you have to speak out English, whether you like it or not. However, there still exist some problems after taking the class. Firstly, I find that different regional accents that English speakers have are the big obstacle for us English learners to overcome. We have indeed studied the foreign language for many years, but just focused on the standard English. So, when we listen to some non-standard English in our coursebook, we can hardly understand what the speakers are saying, not to mention interpret it. This gives us a reminder that you need to have a good mastery of different kinds of varieties of English, not just the Standard English if you as an interpreter want to perform well on different occasions. Secondly, the huge psychology stress is also a big problem we always meet when interpreting. When we learn the course, actually, we do the job in an ideal environment. We just listen to the sound recordings and interpret to ourselves. What only matters is our professional skill. However, interpreting in the real situation is not such a simple case at all. Psychology stress is a good example. The occasion, the persons you serve for, the atmosphere, all these things may cause your tension during your job and therefore bring a bad effect on your performance. Mistakes, embarrassment caused by stage fright occur very often. So, what we should do now to help us overcome psychology stress in the futures interpreting job? Maybe, the best way is just to put yourself in the real situation. The more you have experienced, the more capable you would become of dealing with unexpected conditions. Therefore, if Im asked whether I have some advice for our teaching, this is all I want to saycreating some chances for students to practice their interpreting theory and skills in the practical use. Possibly if will be a tough job, but it really can benefit us a lot! I always stick to this point and never doubt about it that we will get better and better in interpreting,with the help of Ms Yu.