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영어

As simultaneous interpretation is widely utilized on TV, it is not rare in Korea to witness non-professional interpreters are challenging this highly complicated human information processing. This article examined an English into Korean simultaneous interpretation by a non-professional interpreter to cover UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s speech on March 24, 2014. The interpreter who was a journalist working for a Korean TV station also tried to simultaneously interpret CNN’s breaking news at a TV studio and ended up a total failure last year. Although she did not sit at a TV studio this time, the reporter omitted a significant amount of the original speech leaving exceptionally long pauses, EVS and TTS in her interpretation. Particularly, the portion of concurrent listening and speaking which makes simultaneous interpretation very demanding was extremely low. As a result, the performance was nothing more than a poor random consecutive interpretation as the reporter produced one Korean sentence while paying no attention to the concurrently incoming messages and listened to the next segments without any utterance leaving long pauses. In spite of some assertions that translation and interpretation ability is a natural consequence of bilingualism, this case clearly attests that simultaneous interpretation, at least from English into Korean, should be carried out by professionals interpreters who acquired the ability to optimally allocate a limited capacity to several submodules of interpretation after a long and systematic training.