An Analysis Of The Difficulties In Listening In Interpretation And Their Coping Straetgies

As a modern profession, Interpreting has established its significant status in theinternational community in its short history. In nowadays society, from high-level politicaltalks to business negotiations, interpreters’ intelligence and effort have become anindispensable part of all the international gatherings. With their talents and special skills,interpreters help people overcome language barriers, dispel their suspicion and serve as abridge in intercultural communication.However, the interpreting skill is very difficult to achieve. Only through harsh andintensive training, the interpreter could learn such skills as how to make full preparationbeforehand, how to take notes, how to switch between two languages, and so on.Based on interpreting study achievements, this thesis mainly focuses on the listeningcomprehension in interpretation. On one hand, it is the first step of interpretation. It is alsoone of the most essential links for interpretation. However, affected by various factors, thelistening skills of numerous listening learners are not as good as it should be, no matterjudged from their self-evaluation, or from their listening scores in various Englishexaminations. Listening is still one of the biggest barriers for English learners, and they areeager to find the key to improving their listening comprehension skills. On the other hand,the listening comprehension in interpretation is different from that in other circumstances.The normal listening comprehension can be categorized as a natural listening process, asthe listeners just pay attention to the general idea or the key content, rather than every wordin the listening material, for a smooth communication. Compared with this kind of listening,listening comprehension in interpretation is more precise and professional, and the skillsapplied are quite different. There are many English learners whose listening comprehensionshould be above mediate level, they are still not confident in their interpretation for lack ofprofessional training, especially in note-taking and skill training. Therefore, to create a setof effective approaches to interpreting have become an urgent task.Interpretation is a very complicated and time-efficient interactive process, including aseries of cognitive processing links such as receiving, decoding, memorizing, coding andre-expressing the language information. Some French interpreting researchers representedby Danica Seleskovitch advocated that the whole interpreting process consists of three steps,namely, input and comprehension, memory and note-taking, and reorganizing andexpression. Among the three steps, the input and comprehension process plays thefundamental role in the whole interpreting activity, the memory and note-taking process is the necessary preparation, and the reorganizing and expression process is the finalrealization of the whole interpreting. Besides，scholars in this field have done relevantresearch on interpreting listening comprehension. The research shows that listeningcomprehension in interpretation is much more demanding with its particular aim andrequirements. Based on the previous study, this paper tries to probe the most frequently metbarriers in the students’ daily training and classify these barriers into linguistic factors andnon-linguistic factors by virtue of conducting a survey of150junior English majors byquestionnaire and analyzing the data collected. As to these problems, this paper put forwardsome coping strategies. For instance, the interpreting learners should enhance thecomprehensive knowledge of listening in interpretation such as phonetic knowledge,vocabulary and so on. Besides they also need to broaden their cultural backgroundknowledge, and so on. The training patterns should be divided into intensive listening andextensive listening. Theories of the attentive listening skills and discourse analysis theorycould be applied into the training of interpreting listening comprehension. This paper alsoaims to provide some effective thoughts for interpretation teaching and help the interpretersto overcome the bottlenecks in interpretation.