In his speech at the closing ceremony, President Zhou said that the 110 finalists played an outstanding role and witnessed China’s expansion of its international vision and development of diplomatic talents. The “SISU mode” is of great significance to the training of multilingual relay simultaneous interpreting talents and to China’s international-oriented communication and dialogue.

Li Yansong, President of Shanghai International Studies University, attended the closing ceremony. He said that Shanghai International Studies University hopes to build a communication platform through the competition and promote the training of high-level professional interpreters together with other colleges and universities at home and abroad.

NewClass provides technical support in the whole process from the preliminary contest to the final

This high-value competition in the industry deserves public attention. Chinese was firstly used as an “interlanguage” and new technologies were also applied in this competition which provided more opportunities for simultaneous interpreters to compete in language skills, and establishing a more novel and strict competition system. These innovations put forward higher requirements for the contestants and technical support provided by NewClass. NewClass undertook the programming design of the internet-based test system of the multilingual relay simultaneous interpreting competition in the preliminary contest and the whole-process technical support during the competition, so as to ensure the smooth progress of the competition.

This competition is divided into two parts, i.e. the preliminary contest and the final. In order to allow more players to participate without hesitation, the organizing committee decided to make use of the internet-based platform for  the preliminary contest. With the United Nations competition system for reference, it is the first one in China.

Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation（GIIT） has been cooperating with NewClass for a long time. The Newclass language learning system series products have been in service in SISU. In this competition, NewClass undertook the design, R&D and technical support of the internet-based test system for the preliminary contest. The system fully draws lessons from international practices, and is designed with the functions such as function test, simulation exercise, technical assistance, etc.

In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the test, Newclass added a variety of backup mechanisms in the design of the test system, which are used to solve the impact of server and bandwidth fluctuations on the test when many people took the test concurrently. Eventually, the preliminary contest of more than 300 people was successfully completed.

On July 2, 2019, the final of the relay simultaneous interpreting competition was held at SISU Hongkou Campus. Zhou Mingwei, President of Translators Association of China and President of China Academy of Translation, Professor Zhan Cheng, Secretary General of Interpreters Committee of Translators Association of China, Professor Hannelore Lee-Jahnke, Co-Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Translation & Interpretation, Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation SISU, foreign academician of Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Katrin Zimmermann from Munich University of Applied Languages, Ms. Lahlou Soumiya, Section Chief of Arabic Interpretation Section of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Professor Nasser Abdelaal from Ainshams University in Egypt and Associate Professor Chen Ruiqing from Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey attended the final.

This competition is a pioneering competition of the multilingual relay simultaneous interpreting mode adopted by international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, covering all the six official languages of the United Nations and related languages along “the Belt and Road”, with Chinese as the interlanguage in the relay simultaneous interpreting, the competition involved eight pairs of languages, including Chinese + English, French, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, German, Japanese and Korean. Compared with the first session of the competition, the final competition system is more novel, in which each contestant was required to conduct interpretation for three times. They not only need to interpret the speech video into Chinese from the corresponding language, but also need to choose their own channel to complete the relay with interpreters of other two languages, interpreting Chinese into the language they have learned. The competition system presents higher requirements on the ability, mentality and physical strength of the contestants, and also puts forward higher requirements for technical support. NewClass engineers provided technical support throughout the competition.

After seven rounds of wonderful competition, one for the first prize, two for the second prize and three for the third prize were selected for each language. The closing ceremony and award ceremony were held at Yifu Hall in SISU, subject to a live broadcast on the internet.

NewClass showed gratitude to SISU for the trust! Through supporting the competition, NewClass is allowed to have the opportunity to practice the concept of “Learning Advanced Technologies Applicable in the Real World ”, explore more fields of “school-enterprise cooperation” and fulfill the social responsibility of a R&D enterprise.