Self-repair In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

Self-repair, as a universal linguistic feature, has received considerable attention from scholars across various disciplines. As a result, the academic world has witnessed remarkable achievement in this particular research area. However, with a majority of studies focusing on self-repairs in spontaneous speeches or conversations in a single language, few efforts have been made to discuss self-repairs in the inter-language activity of interpreting. In other words, self-repairs in interpreting have been somewhat underexplored, leaving many essential questions remain largely open.The current thesis is designed to investigate self-repair in Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting (SI) based on a corpus featuring professional interpreters’ performance for the2011Summer Davos. It is the author’s hope that this research can help further an understanding of self-repairs in the interpreting activity and the dynamic process of interpreting as well.Taking previous achievements in classifying self-repairs as its theoretical guide, this study first proposes a tentative classification that is suitable for self-repairs in Chinese-English SI. On the basis of236instances of self-repair identified in the corpus, this research subsequently examines the distribution of different self-repair types and observes the placement of interruption points in making self-repairs. The data analysis indicates that self-repairs in Chinese-English SI boast distinctive features when compared with self-repairs in first language (L1), second language (L2) and Chinese-English consecutive interpreting (CI). The characteristics are summarized as follows:(1) covert repetition repair is the most frequently observed self-repair type in professional interpreters’Chinese-English SI performance;(2) a higher proportion of same information rephrasing repairs is observed in professional interpreters’Chinese-English SI performance than in Chinese-English CI performance;(3) compared with L1and L2speakers, professional interpreters undertaking Chinese-English SI tasks make more different information repairs and fewer lexical error repairs;(4) when making self-repairs, professional interpreters in the context of Chinese-English SI prefer immediate interruption than delayed ones, manifesting a tendency to cut off their speech flow much earlier than both L1speakers and student interpreters in the context of Chinese-English CI.