Yes, simultaneous interpretation/translation is impressive to see in action. In one of the organizations I worked for, we had a parelegal who was a multilingual court interpretator..Spanish and Portuguese /English. She held herself to a professional standard in terms of ethics, accuracy, etc. I have witnessed far too many situations where the translator from English to Chinese and vice versa, ended up translating and summarizing inaccurately, to give the real audience/respondent the more genuine flavour of what was truly said.
Some languages are quite difficult to learn as an adult...and IMHO, Chinese is one of them. I know 5 different Canadian friends and 1 sister who tried to learn to speak (Mandarin) and read Chinese as adults. All of these people are of Chinese descent, with mother tongue, Cantonese dialect family, not Mandarin....which is completely different.
They all had a tough time...much more difficult than for any of them to learn French when they were children.
I guess after knowing how some people got burned on claimed language fluencies, I still won't be adding it to my resume. You see, my mother speaks and understands only Chinese. That is my key personal benchmark...there are tough times in communication between her and all her adult children with their eroded fluency... sometimes the most critical things to express between parent and child cannot be communicated most accurately ..and it does create misunderstandings/conflict, like you wouldn't believe. So there is no way, I can claim fluency comfortably with others....who won't slow down for me...or don't speak in linguistic shortcut concepts like parents do in order to cope with their childrens' eroded fluencies.
But there is a certain amount of personal knowledge gained knowing from a non-English language, even if bastardized by now, that one knows certain cultural nuances are just tougher to translate accurately from Chinese to English. For instance, I find it hard to express ying-yang thing of different foods in English.