An Empirical Study On Tolerable Grammatical Errors In Manuscript-free C-E Simultaneous Interpretation

There are intolerable mistakes and tolerable errors in C-E simultaneous interpretation. Intolerable mistakes lead to misunderstanding of the original meaning, while tolerable errors basically do not though formally wrong. According to the author's rough observation, those tolerable errors can be accepted by the audience.This thesis has Moser-Mercer's quality measurement model and Gile's Effort Model as its theoretical framework. The thesis analyzes the tolerable errors of the professional interpreters, untrained English-majored postgraduates, first-year interpreting-oriented postgraduates and second-year interpreting-oriented postgraduates in C-E simultaneous interpretation mainly from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. The software of SPSS 13.0 is used to analyze whether there are any significant differences between the categories of tolerable errors by each group of subjects.Here is a list of findings. First, there are sixteen categories of tolerable errors such as disagreement of subjects and predicates, misrecognition of part of speeches, misuses of tense, past participle, conjunction and verb infinite, failure to use inversion patterns in interrogative sentences, wrong omission of subject, misuses of indefinite articles and voice, wrong combination of two predicate verbs in one sentence without conjunctions, misuse of singular or plural form of nouns or pronouns, misuse of comparative degree and superlative degree, misuse of verb phrases, Chinese-style topic sentence and redundant repetitions.Second, the untrained postgraduates and first-year postgraduates committed fewer errors than the second-year postgraduates because they left more parts of the original speech non-translated and waited longer in interpreting than the second-year, failing to convey most information as quickly as required and even the communication as a whole. The professional interpreters committed fewer errors than all the other groups of subjects in amount and category.Third, the statistical results show that there is a significant difference between the errors of the postgraduates and professionals, between those of the first-year and second-year postgraduates, between those of the untrained and second-year postgraduates and also among those of the three groups of postgraduates. But there is no significant difference between those of the untrained and first-year postgraduates.Fourth, the causes of tolerable errors contain insufficient effort allocation, inadequate memorizing capacity, the influence of the source language and tongue slips. There are four occasions to accept tolerable errors:the error of the inflections, the error recognizable in the context, the error recognizable by logic and the errors due to tongue slips. Communication theory can explain the reasons to accept tolerable errors.This thesis has come up with the following suggestions. First, it is necessary to loosen the requirement for grammatical accuracy in SI quality assessment, ensuring that interpreters should be relieved enough to allocate their efforts in putting across the original meaning to the audience. Second, the teacher should encourage his or her students to keep pace with the delivery of the original speech and allow them to commit grammatical errors sometimes during the primary stage of simultaneous interpretation training. Of course, his or her tolerance for errors should diminish little by little as time goes on.