Information Loss And Coping Strategies In Two-way Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreting is inter-lingual, inter-cultural, oral or signed mediation, enabling communication between individuals or groups who do not share or do not choose to use the same language. An interpreter's task is to ensure the successful information flow from the speaker to the audience. As a mediator, interpreter helps achieve communication intentions via information flow. Completeness and accuracy are two criteria for interpreters to bear in mind in terms of information transmission. Any unintentionally omitted information or inaccurately translated information will negatively affect communication and interpreting quality. Information loss in translation is almost unavoidable, letting alone in interpreting. But if we can find out the specific reasons why information losses occur, it will help to improve the performance of interpreting. Therefore, this paper aims to answer the following questions: What are lost from comprehension to production process? Where and how are they lost? Is there any compensation? The research has found out that conjunctions and prepositions are the easiest to lose from English to Chinese interpreting and verbs in the opposite direction; being busy with note-taking, limited memory capacity and low translating ability are three main reasons that cause information loss. Possible pedagogical implications are offered respectively in the paper.