An Experimental Report On The Impact Of Using Compression Strategy On Trainee Interpreters’ SI Quality

Compression is a common strategy used in interpreting.Compression strategy reflects interpreters’ conscious initiative to streamline their language use.By using compression strategy,interpreters may have more concise interpreting output with less cognitive load being employed.The existing studies have proved the effectiveness of using compression strategy in simultaneous interpretation(SI).Trainee interpreters,especially those just start learning SI,may lack the awareness of using appropriate interpreting strategies to improve their SI performance.In order to investigate the use of compression strategy among trainee interpreters in C-E SI,an experiment was conducted among 13 MTI trainee interpreters,and their interpreting versions were compared with an expert interpreter to examine the possible difference of their use of compression strategy.It was found that the expert interpreter exceled the trainee interpreters in both the frequency of using compression strategy and the quality of interpreting.Though there was no obvious difference between them in using lexical and syntactic compression,great gap existed in their use of semantic compression.The expert interpreter was more active in screening out the iterative,unimportant and extra-linguistic information in the ST,by either replacing or omitting them.Moreover,the expert interpreter also conducted more semantic generalization.In contrast,the trainee interpreters seemed to have poorer awareness of using semantic compression.The study verifies the high applicability of compression strategy in C-E SI.It is suggested that trainee interpreters should enhance their awareness of using compression,especially the strategy of semantic compression in C-E SI.Moreover,the study also pointed out some approaches for achieving compression strategy with specific examples.