A Corpus Approach To Speech Errors Of Interpreting Mirroring Cognitive Barriers

As Bussmann mentioned that a speech error is a deviation from the apparently intended form of an utterance. Speech Errors of Interpreting (SEI) refer to those occurring in consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. There have been a lot of psycholinguistic explanations for general speech errors, but relatively small number has been found for SEI. To address the reasons for SEI, there has been more focus on the interpreting skills, strategies and language proficiencies than on the cognition. This paper investigates into the reasons by hypothesizing that 1) The SEIs mirror the interpreter’s cognitive barriers 2) The professional interpreters are cognitively smarter than the student interpreters, aiming to discover the connections between SEI and cognition. To test these hypotheses, this study has first established media corpus (43 contestants and 8 more professional interpreters with 8.2 hours and 4 G data) of interpreting concerning consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. The corpus has been categorized and indexed according to linguistic errors and cognitive mirroring. The former is categorized by grammar, syntax, morphology, phonology and coherency in particular and the latter is dealt with by combining Gile’s Effort Model and M-model. According to the statistics,90 more passages are involved and 22 classifications of errors are employed with 492 errors found. And then we conduct comparisons between performances of the consecutive interpreting and the simultaneous interpreting by introducing four cognitive barriers. Thirdly, we compare speech errors in interpreting performances of the professional interpreters with those of the student interpreters. By analyzing the corpus, we discover that SEIs not necessarily influence the interpreting as a whole, but they do delay, interrupt and mislead interpreting. Finally, this paper arrives at two results:1) SEIs can mirror cognitive barriers and it is in a two-way manner.2) the professional interpreters are cognitively smarter than the student interpreters, but the professional interpreters make the same errors as the student interpreters because of the same cognitive barriers. The findings of the media corpus study have testified the two hypotheses to some degree, but why cognitive barriers have less influence on the professional interpreters and how adverse influence of cognitive barriers on the student interpreters can be mitigated remain to be explored. To conclude, the SEIs mirror the cognitive barriers in the following aspects:thinking, perception, memory and attention and the professional deals with cognitive barriers better than the student. These findings confirm the connection between SEI and cognition to some degree and will benefit the interpreters by increasing cognitive awareness during interpreting training.