The Influences Of Psycho-physiological Components On Consecutive Interpreting Strategies: An Empirical Study

This thesis chooses 8 participants as the research subjects (4 professional interpreters and 4 senior ESL undergraduates). An empirical research is made on consecutive interpreting strategies from the perspective of psycho-physiological components which are involved in the process of consecutive interpretation. Our specific research questions are: (1) What are psycho-physiological components? What are the differences between student and professional interpreters in terms of psycho-physiological components? (2) How do the psycho-physiological components influence interpreters'strategy-choosing? (3) What kind of interpreting strategies have the 8 participants adopted in the experiment? What are the differences between student and professional interpreters'strategy-choosing under the influences of psycho-physiological components?The interpretations are recorded. We also make efforts to explore the thoughts of subjects by resorting to adopting instruments such as stimulated recall, questionnaire and post-test interviews. Through qualitative analysis of questionnaires, notes, recordings of interpretation and stimulated recalls and self reports in the post-test interviews, we observe the following tentative findings:(1) Psycho-physiological refers to the common features on psychophysiology shared by all the interpreters in the process of interpretation. The findings of questionnaires illustrate that student and professional interpreters mainly differ in the components of attention, logic, confidence, perseverance, rigour, memory and synthesis as well. Among these components, attention and logic rank first, perseverance and confidence the second, memory, rigour and synthesis the third.(2) Psycho-physiological components play a direct, integrated and interweaving role on interpreters'strategy choices. These components are involved in the whole process of interpretation and by then to shed impacts on strategy choosing and the quality of interpretation as well. Among the most distinguished 7 components, confidence, perseverance and rigour influence the whole process of interpretation. Attention and memory mainly work at the stage of memorizing and conceptualizing while logic and synthesis paly a significant role at the stage of expressing and self-monitoring.(3) The strategies used by the subjects are mainly illustrated on the three stages in the process of consecutive interpretation. At the stage of memorizing and conceptualizing, being influenced by the components of attention and memory, the subjects (both student and professional interpreters are included) mainly adopt two strategies: memorizing relying on memory and taking notes. Only a few student interpreters choose the strategy of foregrounding to facilitate memory. To be more specific, professional interpreters have built skilled memorizing and note-taking tactics. They are able to form propositions and internal language during the process of listening and comprehending. However, student interpreters rely too much on taking notes to recall the source text that they accordingly have to reorganize and produce the interpretation based on the clues of notes. When they have difficulty in recalling, they mainly adopt strategies like transcoding and word-for-word interpreting according to the word order of the notes. At the stage of expressing, being affected by the components of logic and synthesis, strategies such as word-for-word interpreting, transcoding and thinking aloud are frequently used by the subjects. Professional interpreters focus more on the consistency and fluency of the content by using strategies like backtracking, deferring or prolonging the pronunciation of some words to win more time. However, being limited by the proficiency of recalling and expressing, student interpreters rely too much on either memory or notes to retain information. As a result, they tend to resort more to the strategies such as backtracking, repetition, deferring, thinking aloud, code-switching etc. At the stage of self-monitoring, both student and professional interpreters have employed strategies like repetition, backtracking, replacement and false start to make the interpretation more coherent. But as for the validity and effectiveness of their strategy choices, professional interpreters are prior to student interpreters. Meanwhile, student interpreters'frequent and automatic uses of strategies mentioned above will nevertheless impair the consistency and fluency of interpretation.According to the above findings, it is suggested that interpreting courses should center on interpreting skill training and more attention should be paid to develop student interpreters'psycho-physiological components. In order to overcome the huge pressure in interpretation, a qualified interpreter should not only possess excellent language competence but also good psycho-physiological competence. Hence, while offering language courses to improve student interpreters'interpretation skills, it is beneficial to help the student interpreters establish self-confidence, position themselves as professionals, build a positive working attitude, developing their acute thinking ability, response capacity and teamwork spirit.