Use of thematic corpus in preparation of Chinese- Portuguese conference interpreting a pilot- study via Sketch Engine platform

Corpus linguistics has been revealing its methodological relevance in language-related studies. By examining corpus use in interpreting, this chapter adopts a thematic corpus from the Sketch Engine platform for the purpose of conference interpreting preparation, to study its influence on the quality of consecutive interpreting, with a special focus on Chinese-Portuguese language combination. Basing on experimental protocols designed by previous studies (Díaz-Galaz, 2012; Xu, 2015, 2018), a pilot-study was designed and conducted, taking into account the specificities of the Chinese-Portuguese language combination in Macao’s circumstances, to explore the synergetic influence of terminological preparation for interpreting. A group of MTI students from Macao participated in the experiment and both test group and control group were created for data analysis. Preliminary results manifested that, despite the positive influence of corpus preparation on the quality of interpreting, its conspicuity was more noticeable when it was combined with other preparation methods. This conclusion goes beyond the experiment’s scope, but contributes to an integrated conference interpreting preparation design for interpreting curriculum and training.