A Communicative Approach To Consecutive Interpreting Training

With the development of China's foreign exchanges with the countries around the world in politics, economy and culture, the need for qualified interpreters is growing all the way. In the course of such a development, many scholars and experts carry out research on interpretation from different perspectives. Meanwhile, the practicing interpreters, who take interpretation as their career, sum up their interpreting practices in a lot of reflective experience, and those bilingualists who aim to take interpretation as career hope to improve interpretation by receiving professional training.Consecutive interpreting, a key type of interpretation, plays a significant role in interpreter training and occasions when accuracy is a first and foremost requirement on interpretation. Consecutive interpreting serves as a fundamental part in interpreter training, which aims at improvement of trainees'interpretation performance. Meanwhile, consecutive interpreting is widely employed in conferences, public speeches and press releases, to name a few. These interpreting occasions, however, are quite different from traditional classroom teaching, which finds itself inadequate to comply with field interpreting realities, especially conference interpreting which expects an excellent performance on the part of interpreters. On the other hand, it is evident that interpreting is very much characterized by skill and competence. The aptitude of trainee interpreters is another aspect that is of vital importance. The reason that many interpretation theories cannot be effectively applied to interpreter training is that they idealize the actual level of trainee interpreters'competence, and cannot solve the confrontation between improving interpretation skills and improving language competence. Although interpreter training is no equal to language teaching, language competence cannot be ignored. Researchers tend to bring foreign language competence into their focus, taking mother tongue competence for granted, but mother tongue competence is also important in interpretation. This paper delves into the components of an interpreter's communicative competence, based on the theoretical considerations of Hymes, Canale & Swain, and Bachman. Although no theory on communicative competence directly takes interpreter's communicative competence as subject for research, it does not deny the applicability of communicative theories on interpreter's communicative competence. Instead, it is reasonable that interpreters'language competence should be understood and analyzed from the perspective of communicative competence. It is believed in this paper that communicative competence is an ideal theoretical framework that can be utilized to evaluate trainee interpreter's performance in the consecutive interpreting stage of interpreter training. Based on the previous research on communicative competence, this paper makes an analysis of the components of an interpreter's communicative competence, and conference interpretation as a communicative event, illustrating the complexity and dimensions of the communication via interpretation. Therefore interpreter training should refrain from teaching skills as a major activity, but rather centered on simulated interpreting practices intertwined with skill instruction and aimed at enhancing interpretation competence. By the case study, this paper sums up the real practice of interpreter training to illustrate the efficiency and applicability of simulated consecutive interpretation.