Exploring Self-repair In Consecutive Interpreting Between Professional Interpreters And Student Interpreters

Self-repair as an interpreting strategy prevails in communication. A great deal ofresearch on self-repair has been conducted from different perspectives. Levelt(1983)and Kormos(1999) have established the L1Speech Production Model and L2SpeechProduction Model respectively. However, without considering self-repair incross-linguistic processes, such research mainly focuses on the self-repair in L1or L2production. Thus the phenomenon of self-repair in interpreting deserves further study.On the basis of the theories of Levelt and Kormos, Zeng(2012) and Hong(2012)construct a taxonomy of self-repair in interpreting. This thesis will apply theclassification of self-repair by Zeng(2012) and Hong(2012) to illustrate thedifferences of self-repair types between student interpreters and professionalinterpreters in consecutive interpreting. Supported by the above-mentioned theoriesand based on the previous studies, the thesis intends to answer the following question:Of self-repair types, what are the differences between student interpreters andprofessional interpreters in consecutive interpreting?The present study is based on experimental tests with eight interpreters---fivefrom MTI candidates in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (hereinafterreferred to as Group A) and three from Geli Translation Company (hereinafterreferred to as Group B) by completing a consecutive interpreting task. The subjectswere required to do English-Chinese consecutive interpreting of a passage. In theexperiment, the proficiency of language and interpreting skills were controlled asconstants. Methods of quantitative analysis were adopted to investigate self-repairinherent in CI performance. In the quantitative analysis, the author used descriptiveanalysis to process the data from the experiment.The author makes an attempt to reveal the priority of self-repair characterized byprofessional interpreters compared with student interpreters so as to offer some suggestions for interpreting learning and instruction.