A Study On Trainee Interpreters’Self-repair In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

Self-repairs are self-initiated corrections of one’s own speech. Self-repair, a common linguistic phenomenon, has drawn wide attention."On-the-spot delivery" of simultaneous interpretation will easily induce errors and faults in speech, thus interpreters tend to make self-repairs. Meanwhile, interpreters need to guarantee fluent delivery to maintain their professionalism, thus relf-repairs should be avoided to the greatest extent. Therefore, it will be worthwhile to analyize self-repairs in simultaneous interpretation. This thesis attempts to explore relf-repairs of trainee interpreters in English to Chinese simultaneous interpretation, deepen understanding in the study process, and hopefully offer suggestions to future study and practice.This thesis takes the speech of Dambisa Moyo at TED as experiment material, and the previous achievements in self-repair classification as theoretical guide. It proposes a tentative classification of self-reoairs, and conducts a detailed analysis of the characteristics and possible reasons of self-repair. The findings are as follows:(1) the trainee interpreters’self-repairs fall into five major catigories, namely repeated information self-repair, different information self-repair, error self-repair, appropriateness self-repair, and failed self-repair.(2) Repeated information self-repair and error self-repair are the most frequent categories, and the following are different information self-repair, appropriateness self-repair, and failed repair. Moreover, the frequency of editing terms is very small.(3) The reasons for self-repair include inter-language and intra-language transfer between LI and L2, difficulties in effort distribution, lacking of English competence and interpretation skills, and poor psychological quality. In order to decrease self-repair in interpreting, trainee interpreters should enhance their language competency and practice more.