A Preliminary Study Of English In Asean And Its Impact On Interpreting

With the establishment of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, China-ASEAN Expo has become a more and more important platform for communication between China and ASEAN countries, and English is widely used as a lingua franca in ASEAN and China. However, influenced by their own cultures and native language, English in ASEAN as a lingua franca has formed its variations. With the deepening of communication, the demand for English interpreters is increasing. The local interpreting trainees should have a better understanding of English in ASEAN countries so as to perform well in the process of communication. This paper will summarize the common phenomena of variation of English in ASEAN countries based on the ASEAN English interpretation corpus. Through the case study of interpreting trainees, the impact of varieties of English on interpreting will be sought, and the function of prefabricated chunks in reducing the impacts and increasing the accuracy and fluency of interpreting will be explicated.In this paper, through the collection of speeches made by ASEAN speakers in different meetings, and the marking of linguistic variations in these speeches, the answers to the following questions will be found out:1) what kinds of phonological variations commonly occur in the speeches?2) What kinds of lexical and collocation variations commonly occur in the speeches?3) What kinds of syntactic variations commonly occur in the speeches?An interpreting test is carried out among four third grade postgraduate students whose interpreting skills and ability are considered to be homogeneous. They are equally separated into two groups. One of the groups has acquired relevant prefabricated chunks trainings before the test. After the test, interviews are carried out. Besides, the data of the test are collected and the result of accuracy and fluency of each interpreting performance are calculated. The result of the analysis showed that the variations have influence on interpreting in many aspects such as listening comprehension, distribution of attention, instantaneity, and interpreter’s psychology. The group of students who are trained with prefabricated chunks turned out to have higher accuracy and fluency. Therefore, prefabricated chunks can help the interpreters to relief those influences of varieties of English.