A Study On Semantic Repair In Consecutive Interpretation From Chinese To English

Interpreting enjoys a long history which can be traced back to the very beginning of human society. As an intermediary language medium, it enables different language groups to conduct economic and cultural exchanges with each other. With the ever deepening globalization, interpreting now plays an increasingly important role in the communication between different countries. As a result, interpreting activities have become professionalized in a few decades, winning much attention and respect from all sectors of the community. However, interpreting research still faces significant challenges due to the fact that interpreting behavior not only involves the complexity of language processing, but also relates to various social and psychological factors. Lacking authentic data of interpreting activities also adds to the difficulty. Considering these problems, it will be more scientific and realistic to analyze a certain aspect of or a certain phenomenon appeared in interpreting behavior on the basis of sufficient data than to strive for establishing an interpreting theory that can be applicable everywhere.It is with this awareness that the author has looked into a large number of interpreting materials, and was caught by a special phenomenon that interpreters, even those highly qualified ones, would make mistakes sometimes, and they somehow repair the original speech automatically. This repairing behavior poses a significant effect on the quality of interpreting, yet little attention has been paid to it. In fact, though "repair", as a frequent oral behavior, has long attracted the attention of linguists both at home and abroad, there is not much systemic research on interpreter’s repairing behavior. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate into this nearly untouched topic. The research subject is confined to the repairs appeared in consecutive interpreting from Chinese to English. The corpus is built by making transcriptions of the consecutive interpreting videos of20press conferences, among which five are the press conferences held for Premier Wen to meet with Chinese and foreign journalists (2008-2012); another five are the press conferences held for Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi to answer journalists’questions about the diplomatic relations and policies of China (2008-2012); and the rest ten are news press conference held by the State Council Information Office of China (2008-2012). The total duration of these video clips is33hours.As a special language behavior, the major aim of consecutive interpreting is to convey in the most efficient way every semantic element and every intention and feeling of the message that the source-language speaker is directing to target-language recipients. Combining this feature, the interpreters’repairing behavior is termed as semantic repair (SR) in the present thesis. The study is a descriptive one based on authentic data, its major research questions are as following:(1) What are the most frequent types of SR in consecutive interpreting from Chinese to English?(2) How are the different types of SR distributed in consecutive interpreting?(3) What are the major factors or linguistic phenomena leading to these different types of SR?(4) Is the interruption point always placed right after the reparandum? If any delayed interruption point exists, then what is the normal span of delaying and where is it placed within a certain linguistic constituent?(5)What are the frequently used editing terms in interpreters’SR and what are the functions of these editing terms?The research shows that the interpreter’s semantic repair mainly falls into five categories, namely same-information repair, different-information repair, error repair, appropriateness repair and a rest category of repair. Different-information repair is the most frequent type, and it is mostly triggered by the following trouble sources:covert sense, omission, metaphor, proverbs/idioms, proper name, temporal expression, number, noun clusters, word order and morphological variation. In addition, the interpreters frequently use repetition as an interpreting strategy. It is also found that in about92.16%of the SR, the original utterance is interrupted immediately, namely within the reparandum or with null delay right after the reparandum. Delayed interruption points are quite rare and most of them are placed at or near the end of a constitution in a sentence. Among all the SR made by the interpreters, only24.7%of them involve the use of editing terms, which is less frequent than that in daily communication. The used editing terms, however, are chosen to ensure the integrity of the interpretation. The reasons why these characteristic of interpreters’repair exist have also been discussed from multiple perspectives.The study contributes to bettering our understanding about the interpreting process, and shed some light on interpreting training. It also enriches the study on self-repair phenomenon. However, it still has many limitations and the research methodology still needs to be improved. It is appreciated if more academics and interpreting practitioners can probe into this phenomenon and use their research findings to enhance both interpreting research and training to a higher level.