An Analysis Of Interlanguage Errors In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

In recent years, the perspective of interdiscipline has become a trend in interpreting research. This thesis conducts research on interpreting from the perspective of interlanguage (IL), a concept from Second Language Acquisition, which is also an attempt to extend the scope of IL research in terms of sample collection.This study makes analysis of the IL errors committed by 22 contestants during the second round of the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting in the National Interpreting Contest, East China Area, by following Corder's EA procedures. After the analysis, 191 IL errors have been identified in the interpreting production. Taking the Gui Shichun's idea and the real condition into consideration, these errors are classified into four groups and the causes of the category are explained. In the end, this thesis makes implications for interpreting teaching on the basis of the findings of the study, i.e., the IL errors in the CI production of the contestants are caused by the influences of Chinese, their mother tongue, and English, the target language.There are six chapters in this thesis.Chapter 1 is the introduction to the whole thesis. The research background is given, with focus on the fundamentals of interpreting, such as its definition, classification, criteria and researches on interpreting. Then the significance of this research is covered in three perspectives. In the last section of Chapter 1, the organization of the whole thesis is presented.Chapter 2 focuses on the theoretical background information of IL. It introduces the theories of Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and the concepts of IL, followed by the explanation of the general features of IL, namely, systematic feature, permeable feature, dynamic feature and fossilized feature.Chapter 3 describes the process of this research, including the introduction to the subjects, methods and procedures. In the last section of Chapter 3, three questions of this research are put forward.Chapter 4 is the data analysis of the IL errors in the interpreting production of 22 interpreting contestants, following Corder's procedures of Error Analysis. These IL errors are first identified and then described after the rough division into four major groups, namely, errors at lexical-perceptual level, errors at lexico-grammatical level, errors at syntactical level and Chinglish expressions. The explanations of the IL errors are made on the basis of the demonstration of the errors'frequencies.Chapter 5 is about the findings of this research and its implications for CI teaching. The findings correspond to the questions, i.e., both mother tongue and target language have influence on the IL errors in interpreting production of the contestants, which demonstrates the feature of fossilization. Based on these findings, the implications for interpreting teaching have been made, i.e., teachers should encourage their students to recite some original English speeches delivered at international conferences or other formal meetings and do the analysis of IL errors from the dictation of their own interpreting production, which can help to avoid IL errors in their future interpreting work as well as enlarge the students'accumulation of background knowledge and increase their cross-cultural awareness. For teachers, they should also pay attention to the sufficiency of the input in interpreting class.Chapter 6 is the conclusion of the whole thesis and the limitations of this research are presented in the second section of this chapter. At last, the whole thesis ends with the suggestions for future research in this regard.