An Empirical Study On Consecutive Interpreting Strategies

This thesis reports an empirical study on the consecutive interpreting strategies of Chinese non-interpreters from a qualitative perspective. Our specific research questions are: 1) What interpreting strategies have the students employed? 2) What are the differences of the interpreting strategies between self-trained students and ordinary students? 3) How does world knowledge affect interpreting strategies? 4) What are the potential factors that contribute to the students' strategy choice?The subjects involved in the study were eight postgraduates major in English from a university in Nanjing. The instruments to elicit data included two interpreting tasks, stimulated recall and an in-depth interview. The major findings of the research are as follows:1) The subjects memorized information mainly relying on taking notes. Then they tried to recall and reconstruct information by dint of the notes they had taken. If they had difficulty in retrieving the information relevant to the notes, they might draw inferences based on their world knowledge and the context to construct information. They mainly employed word-for-word interpreting strategy. In order to gain time for information retrieving and language formulating, they would speak slowly, think aloud, or swich code to make their interpretations sound fluent. During the process of target language production, they also monitored their speech for both its meaning and well-formedness. In general, the students had adopted the following self-monitoring strategies: repetition, reformulation replacement and false start.2) The self-trained students had developed some idiosyncratic memorizing strategies. They often deliberately drew inferences according to the topic of the speech to make the interpretations more coherent. Some of them could form propositions and internal language. They tended to use deferring strategy to gain time for information retrieving. The ordinary students, however, relied either on memory or notes to retain information. They resorted more to transcoding because they often...