Problems Of And Coping Tactics For Non-native Accents In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

Most previous studies on the impact of speakers’non-native accents on interpreting quality analyzed the participants’ interpretation quantitatively.Results were from the researchers’ scoring of interrpreting quality,while the participants could not voice their own experience and feedback.Besides,some similar quantitative research used qualitative methods as triangulation including retrospective questionnaires and interviews,but only a few examples were cited to support the quantitative results and the coding scheme of such qualitative data was not clearly explained.Meanwhile,the retrospective interviews in these studies cursorily asked participants about their overall impression of the interpreting tasks,without memory cues to assist participants’ retrospection.Inspired by these studies,this thesis focused on retrospective interviews and clarified its coding framework.To facilitate participants’recollection in the interviews,the researcher provided scripts and recordings of the source texts as well as the recordings of interpretation.Regarding speakers’ non-native accents in interpreting,this thesis raised two research questions:(1)What problems do non-native accents bring about to student interpreters’comprehension in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting?(2)How do interpreters cope with such problems?The researcher invited 15 second-year student interpreters majoring in English interpreting from the School of English and International Studies of Beijing Foreign Studies University as his participants.After two simulated English-Chinese interpreting tasks,they were immediately interviewed on the problems triggered by accents and their coping tactics.Analyzing the interview transcripts within a content-analysis coding framework based on the pre’vious literature,the researcher discovered that participants faced phonemic and prosodic problems induced by non-native accents,with the former more frequently mentioned.The interpreters’coping tactics consisted of comprehension,prevention and reformulation tactics.Comprehension and reformulation tactics were more frequently reported,while two new sub-categories of prevention tactics are mentioned beyond the original coding framework:enhancement of concentration and familiarization of speakers’accents.