Interview next week in MANDARIN...uh oh please advise

hi, while i've not had interviews in mandarin, i spent my freshman summer interning at citibank in shanghai and in my sophomore summer i interned at a hedge fund where i made conference calls to chinese companies. at the time, i too was fluent but not well versed in business terms.

so.

go to http://dict.cn/

it's a really good dictionary website, they have translations for "GDP", "interest rates", "subprime" etc... and you can search in english for the chinese translation.

granted one week is a short time to prepare, but if you are fluent already it's just the vocabulary. grab an article off of wsj or bloomberg and try and translate it checking for business terms as you go along. good luck.

you'll be fine. i'm was in the exact same situation as you. they told me it was ok to substitute technical business terms in english and that's exactly what i did. mostly, they just want to see if you are truly a "native" speaker. if you are, then you can easily pick up those business terms when you start working in a chinese environment. good luck!

I've had to interview in other languages (though not Mandarin specifically), and it is about 10x harder to speak during interviews.

Prep with friends, answer common interview questions, and learn at least some of the terminology.

You should also state upfront that you do not know any business terminology or anything like that in Mandarin and will have to describe them in simpler terms or use English.

I've gotten screwed before with interviews in foreign languages but that's because I did not follow the above advice. :)

GS China website has a GS english to Chinese finance dictionary. VERY useful.

To "substitute technical business terms in english" is absolutely fine. I know some people working in IB and consulting in China. They are native Mandarin speakers (not even necessarily fluent English speakers) while they always swith back and forth between English(technical terms) and Mandarin(other phrases) in almost every sentence.

For phrases like PE, VC, Hedge Fund, i-banking, LBO, swap, GDP... Chinese banker would never translate them into Mandarin when they're talking.

Trust me, many of them are proud of that they can mix the two languages...

I had to interview in Mandarin and one of the things I did was have my English resume translated into Mandarin. I used chineseresumewriter.com They tend to focus on people who want finance jobs in China. It was helpful because by reading about the Mandarin version of myself before the interview I was able to speak a little more confidently.