Listening Comprehension In English-chinese Consecutive Interpreting: An Empirical Study

As the globalization continues, interpreting has become an indispensible bridge between different languages and cultures, and the development of interpreting research has been greatly pushed forward. Compared with academic research made in interpreting field in the West, interpreting research at home is still a fledgling field, restricted in static description of characteristics of each phase in interpreting process and coping strategies. Empirical research in this field has not been effectively conducted.Listening comprehension is the first step in the process of consecutive interpreting. From the viewpoint of the author, it is also the key step in consecutive interpreting, because if it fails, one can not fulfill CI task no matter how proficient he is in short-term memory, note-taking or coordination. According to Gile's Effort Model of consecutive interpreting, listening comprehension is a nonautomatic process, which requires attention or processing capacity, and capacity available for listening comprehension should not exceed capacity available for listening comprehension, which is simplified as the inequality LR^LA. If the inequlity is not met, problems in listening comprehension may arise and performance will deteriorate. On the basis of the Effort Model of CI put forward by Gile, empirical research is conducted in this thesis to study how well the interpreting students perform in listening comprehension in English-Chinese CI. Research subjects are thirty interpreting students who have received systematic training in CI. In order to make the experiment scientific and accurate, research instruments include questionnaire, test and interview. After collecting all the data, the author uses statistic approach to make a detailed analysis on the data quantitatively and qualitatively. It is found that:(1) Generally speaking, the thirty participants did not perform well in listening comprehension in CI from English to Chinese; (2) The major barriers for those participants include accent, speed, numbers and psychology; (3) Reasons for the major barriers include over-focus on words, weakness in inference and anticipation, little practice with authentic materials and ignorance of developing psychological strength. The author attempts to provide some suggestions to solve or at least alleviate the problems in listening comprehension from three aspects:pre-interpreting preparation, in-process interpreting and coping tactics in the case of listening comprehension failure.