EASC and DEALL will offer "Introduction to Professional Japanese Interpretation" course in Spring 2021, with support from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant. Course details are as follows:

Japanese 5194:
Introduction to Professional Japanese Interpretation

"Words are nothing more than a container for ideas. The interpreter must pour those ideas into a new container."

Instructor: Allyson Sigman (professional conference interpreter with 10 years of experience working in the Japanese automotive industry)
Format: The course will be conducted entirely remotely using Carmen and Slack in conjunction with a web-based interpreter training platform.
Time Commitment: There will be Monday, Wednesday, Friday submissions for homework. There will also be 4 webinars that students must attend live on select Thursdays, 5:30-6:30pm.
Credits: 3 credit hours
Prerequisites: Japanese 5102.01 or 5102.02 (Level 4-II) or instructor’s permission
Call #: 33026, 33027

Japanese 5194 is a course on professional Japanese interpretation. Distinct from translation, which is written, interpretation focuses on speaking fluency. Students will learn how to prepare to speak intelligibly on a given topic while developing fluency in business-level Japanese. As the class is broken into thematic units, students will be responsible for reading on a given topic, preparing vocabulary lists, and getting ready to interpret that content into the opposite language. Those language skills will be applied through hands-on training in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, bidirectionally between Japanese and English. Lecture material will include an overview of the field of interpretation, different modes of interpreting and the techniques involved in each, as well as active listening and public speaking skills. By the end of the semester, you will become familiar with basic theories and concepts of interpretation and acquire a fundamental interpreting skillset.

Themes covered: The course will be organized into thematic units borrowing from ビジネス能力検定. These themes will build the students' Japanese knowledge about how the business world operates. That background knowledge will help when interpreting.

The course will be conducted entirely remotely using Carmen and Slack in conjunction with a web-based interpreter training platform. Students must be able to watch lectures, record videos of their interpretation, post feedback to other students' videos, and attend four web conferences. For this, the instructor recommends a computer with at least 2GB RAM, a stable internet connection of at least 8 Mbps down/2 Mbps up, and a headset with a microphone. If you have any questions about system requirements, please contact the instructor.