Strategies For High-speech-rate E-C Consecutive Interpreting

High-speech-rate is one of the most significant factors affecting interpreters’ performance in E-C consecutive interpreting.This thesis chooses high-speech-rate as research object,trying to figure out the impacts of fast speeches on trainee interpreters and provide some feasible strategies through experiment in which seven CFAU MTI students were invited to participate.The experiment material this paper chooses is the former Australian prime minister,Kevin Rudd’s speech recorded in March,2015 at TED2015.The author divided the material into three parts which were played at normal,medium-to-high and high speed respectively.Through the quantitative analysis,the author found that participants’ interpreting performance changes with the speech rate.To be specific,the higher speed the speech is,the lower the output ratio of primary information is,and the more fillers participants had.Furthermore,the author named three prominent categories of mistakes participants made during the experiment,namely,misinterpretation or loss of numbers,information loss and logic loss.Based on the qualitative analysis and participants’ transcripts,the author puts forward some strategies of high-speech-rate E-C consecutive interpreting in three different stages,specifically,listening,note taking and delivery.In the first part,the author pointed out that short-term,long-term memories and the tactic of predicting should be applied when interpreting fast speeches.In note-taking part,the author used participants’ notes to illustrate and support that interpreters should use appropriate symbols and abbreviations as well as underlining logical relations in their notes when speakers speak fast.In delivery part,the strategies of summarization and omission should be employed.