An Exploratory Study On Self-repair In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

Self-repair, as a universal linguistic feature, frequents first language (LI) andsecond language (L2) communication. The demanding tasks of ’impromptu planning’and ‘on-the-spot，delivery involved in the inter-language activity SimultaneousInetrpreitng (SI) unavoidably induce the self-repair occurrence. Yet most studies inthe interpreting community simply incorporate self-repair into interrelated studies likepause, repetition and dislfuencies，etc., with few devoting to systematic elaboration onitself. Therefore, this paper focuses its research on this aspect.This paper takes Le’velts self-repair structure in LI and Petite’s self-repairtaxonomy in SI as the theoretical guidance, and tentatively proposes a workingclassiifcation of self-repair suited for Chinese-English (C-E) SI. A transcript of7,000words in total is accomplished based on the real-time recordings of a SI class andseveral professionally-trained student inetrpreters.294pieces of self-repair sequencesin C-E SI are sorted out, classiifed, and ifnally built into a small database accordinglyfor research purpose. An in-depth data analysis has been carried out to probe intoself-repair structure in C-E SI, the distribution of self-repair and the possibledistribution differences lying in the student inetrpreters of various proifciency levels.The research ifndings are summarized as follows:(1) Generall’y, Leveltsself-repair structure in LI applies to most instances of self-repair in C-E SI, but thereexist special cases calling for further analysis.(2) Error self-repairs make up thelargest proportion of all self-repair sequences made by student interpreters，but theratio is not particularly high.(3) Student inetrpreetrs differ greatly in self-repairdistribution: professionally-trained ones tend to make appropriateness self-repairswhile the non-professionally trained error ones. According to research ifndings，theauthor puts forward some suggestions for SI training, including enhancing L2automaticity and pragmatic consciousness during inetrpreitng tasks so as to allocatemore attention resources for accuracy in meaning.