UM hosts the First Macao Interpreting Contest
A University of Macau (UM) student recently won the championship at the First Macao Interpreting Contest. Another UM student and a Macao Polytechnic Institute (IPM) student won the two second prizes. The three students will represent Macao in the final of the Sixth Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest to be held in Taipei in April 2016. Hosted by UM’s Department of English, the interpreting contest consisted of three rounds. In the first round, contestants were required to interpret a 90-second-long speech from English to Mandarin with the help of notes. In the second round, contestants were required to deliver the main ideas of a 60-second-long Mandarin speech in English in 45 seconds without taking notes. In the third round, contestants were required to do consecutive interpreting of a conversation between a Mandarin speaker and an English speaker with the help of notes. The panel of judges included Zhang Meifang, Li Defeng, Vincent Wang, Victoria Lei, Hari Venkatesan, and Lily Lim, who are all members of the Federation of Translators and Interpreters of Macau. Stephanie Zhang Xiaoping, a master’s student of translation studies from UM, won the championship. Anita Chao Kit I, another master’s student of translation studies from UM, and Zhang Jingyi, an undergraduate student of Chinese-English translation and interpretation from IPM, won the two second prizes. All three third prizes went to students from UM’s master’s degree programme in translation studies, namely Ether Ouyang Xingyi, Dianne Wu Kai I, and Vicky Ma Yue Cheng. The Cross-Strait Interpreting Contest is an influential annual event jointly organised by Xiamen University and the Taiwan Association of Translation and Interpretation, with the support of the Ministry of Education and the Taiwan Affairs Office. Since its launch in 2009, the contest has attracted more than 10,000 contestants from over 800 universities in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This will be the first time that university students from Macao will participate in the contest. Past events of the contest were covered in mainstream media, including China Central Television (CCTV), China Daily, Television Broadcasts (TVB), Eastern Broadcasting Co (EBC), and Phoenix Satellite Television.