Listening Obstacles In Consecutive Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Interpreting includes four steps, namely, listening comprehension, memorization,conversion and expression. Listening comprehension is the first step and in a sensethe most important step of interpreting, since only when the interpreter fullycomprehends what the speaker says, can s/he faithfully transfer the information loadedin the source language into the target language. If a problem occurs in the process oflistening comprehension, then the following steps cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, itis absolutely essential to summarize the obstacles which we met in listeningcomprehension and find out the coping strategies.The obstacles in listening comprehension can be divided into two types:linguistic obstacles and extra-linguistic ones. The study is conducted under theguidance of Relevance Theory and employs theory and practice combination method.After analyzing Obama’s2013State of the Union Address, the author summarized thelistening obstacles in linguistic aspect and extra-linguistic aspect respectively andproposed the coping strategies. The linguistic obstacles are discussed in four aspects:new words, proper nouns, polysemy and idiom. The extra-linguistic obstacles arediscussed in two aspects: obstacles caused by the lack of specific subject knowledgeand the lack of cultural background knowledge. The coping strategies the authorproposed include making full preparations beforehand, mastering certain listeningskills, accumulating relevant background and encyclopedic knowledge in our dailylife, etc. Such strategies can make it easier for us to find out the optimal relevance,which guarantees the accuracy of our listening comprehension.