This study investigates the audience’s reactions after they have watched four versions of the simultaneous interpreting of a TV press conference. In January 2008, Edison Chen, a Hong Kong based Chinese Canadian movie actor was involved in a widely publicised sex scandal when an estimated 1,300 intimate photographs of him and his female friends had been spread throughout the Internet. The movie star gave a TV press conference in English in Hong Kong to apologise specifically to her female friends involved. A TV company in Taiwan hired Andy Lee, an experienced TV news interpreter, to interpret Edison’s press conference simultaneously live from English to Chinese. However, he interpreted it in a manner that was more exciting than the speaker’s and he also overemphasised in his interpretation where such emphases were not made in the original speech. Therefore, Andy Lee received a torrent of criticisms from the media among Chinese speaking communities worldwide. I obtained the video recordings of the interpretation of the TV conference of four TV stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong and asked the students of the five interpretation classes that I taught to evaluate them using a checklist that I had made based on the analysis of the audience’s reactions to the media. Finally, Andy Lee, the interpreter, was asked to give a talk to the students of my interpretation classes to explain why he interpreted the way he did despite his rich experience in TV interpreting. In this case study, qualitative methods are used to collect and analyse the data to complete the report. The results of this study are expected to shed light on TV interpretation evaluation in general and on TV interpreter training in particular.

Sheng-Jie CHEN received his PhD in Foreign Language Education from the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and is a full-time associate professor of the Department of Applied Foreign Languages and Director of the Translation Center of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST). He is also a freelance conference interpreter. He has published papers on subtitling, real-time subtitling, non-language specific interpreter training, computer-assisted interpreter training, and interpreter training pedagogy. With grants from NTUST and Taiwan National Science Council, Sheng-Jie Chen has presented papers around the world including the University of Bologna at Forli (Italy), Newcastle University upon Tyne (UK), INTERPRETA 2007 in Buenos Aires (Argentina), University of Macerata (Italy), ATINER 2009 Conference (Athens) and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland), etc. Sheng-Jie Chen enjoys conducting research and seeing the world.