An Experiment Report: The Differences In C-E Consecutive Interpreting Skills Between The Professional Interpreter And Student Interpreters

This is an experiment report of a contrastive study on C-E consecutiveinterpreting skills between two parties of interpreters. In the light of the InterpretiveTheory of Translation and the TAPs interview, the report proposes the experimentanalysis.The first party consists of a freelance professional interpreter who has10yearsof working experience, and in the second party are12student interpreters who havebeen professionally trained for2.55years on average under a MA program in auniversity.The steps of the experiment are as follows:1. Prepare for the experiment;2.Conducting the Chinese to English consecutive interpretation by the professionalinterpreter and the student interpreters with each performance recorded;3.Transcribing the interpreting utterances of both professional interpreter and studentinterpreters and analyzing the interpreting skills;4. Interviewing the interpreters tohave them think about in retrospect so as to find out the reasons why they processedinformation in a certain way. In order to ensure the validity and credibility of theexperiment, language competence of the student interpreters has been screened bytheir TEM8-test. In exploring the reasons for the differences in interpreting quality,among a various of possible explanations, the author focuses on the gap in theprocessing of information between the professional interpreter and the studentinterpreters.With the help of the Interpretive Theory and the TAPs interview, the experimentdiscovers that in addition to the traditional factors such as encyclopedic knowledgeand language proficiency, the ability of interpreters in processing of information andin reformulating interpreting on the basis of contextualized understanding have verysignificant impact on the quality of interpreting. As presented by the experiment, the professional interpreter processes information according to the contextualizedunderstanding while the student interpreters interpret just as the source sentence is.Therefore, the interpreting of the student interpreters is nothing but the so-calledfaithful while that of the professional interpreter seems to be more reasonable andexpressive. The study of the experiment is hoped to shed some light on the futuretraining of C-E consecutive interpreting.