December 23 - The lights were on, the curtain was up, and the competitors were ready! A warm welcome brought in this year’s 16th Interpreting Competition in FELC, a traditional annual event hosted by GDUFS English Language and Culture Faculty. 

This year, the senior-oriented competition was conducted in a debate form. This year’s judges were the Vice President of GDUFS Mr. Chen Jianping, and four professors from FELC and SITS (School of Interpreting and Translation Studies).

According to Xu Luomai, one of the judges, the competitors were evaluated from two aspects - information and language. Rudy, an experienced competitor, seemed quite relaxed before the shot. When we interviewed her, she told us that contestants had one week to prepare for the competition.  Ruby went onto tell us that in order to win, contestants needed to do was hold ready as much information about the topic as possible. This year featured a highly controversial debate topic, which was chosen from 30 students' submitted ideas - "Should the BT website be banned?".  

As one of the most long-running competitions at FELC, the Interpreting Competition attracted hundreds of people. Throughout the competition, the wit and sense of humor shown by the debaters brought round after round of applause from the audience. Ms. Zhang Ling, one of the 8 debaters, even held an impromptu survey of the audience to support her view.

After several rounds of competition, there came the most exciting section-the award ceremony. Applause and cheers resonated throughout the hall as Song Lin was announced the first prize winner, and Professor Dwight and Professor Wang Wenxin the best English and Chinese debaters.

After the contest, Mr. Zhan Cheng, Professor from the School of Interpreting and Translation Studies, commented on the contestants' performance. He first congratulated all the contestants for their participation in this contest. As a professional interpreter himself, he said it was no easy job to interpret in front of so many people who speak both Chinese and English.

Song Lin, the winner of the first prize, happily took our interview afterwards. When asked about how he studied English, he told us that "input" was very important. As a major in British and American literature, he enjoys reading novels in his spare time. Apart from that, he worked as a volunteer translator where he helped create subtitles of a British TV series for almost a year. As for interpreting, he thinks note-taking skills are the key to "solving" long speeches.