Self-Repair In Student Interpreters’ Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

In recent years,self-repair in interpreting has become a hot topic in interpreting research.However,studies focusing on self-repair mechanism and causes in simultaneous interpreting are relatively scarce.This study aims to reveal the self-repair mechanism and causes of simultaneous interpreting based on analyzing the ChineseEnglish simultaneous interpreting corpora of the finals of the two All-China Interpreting Contests in 2020 and 2021.To this end,based on the self-repair taxonomy proposed by Levelt(1983),Kormos(1998)and Petite(2005),etc.,this paper classifies self-repair into four maj or categories and 11 sub-categories.The author then manually annotates self-repair in the corpora of the two interpreting contests and analyzes the self-repair mechanism and causes using Levelt’s perceptual loop theory(1983)and Gile’s effort model of simultaneous interpreting(2009),respectively.The results show that,in descending order of frequency,error repair ranks first,followed by appropriateness repair,failed repair and different information repair.Selfrepair proceeds through three stages:identification,checking and re-production.In self-repair,the monitoring mechanism of perceptual loop is crucial with its comparison and instruction function:it compares the output to the source text when accepting the source language and then stimulates inner speech in perceptual loop for further repair;it also matches the utterance with the intended information when the interpreter listen to the output.Besides,the instruction function of the monitoring mechanism is mainly reflected in error repair and appropriateness repair,instructing them to make minimal changes or freely adjust the output.Based on Gile’s effort model of simultaneous interpreting,the causes of selfrepair are may as follows:First,unbalanced cognitive effort.Insufficiency in making listening and analyzing effort leads to interpreter’s deviations or loss of information.Or it could be reflected in the interpreter’s excessive attention to listening and automated production,which brings on insufficient comprehension effort.Second,short-term memory saturation.Interpreter’s short-term memory may be saturated due to certain linguistic or psychological factors,resulting in their inability to store new information in time.Third,differences in interpreters’ linguistic expertise may lead to different self-repair.Incompetent interpreter have a higher possibility of making error repair while competent one would make more appropriateness repair to improve the quality of output.Implications of the study’s findings for interpreter learning include:improving ability to balance cognitive efforts;training short-term memory and enhancing psychological capacity;elevating foreign language ability to avoid grammatical errors.