An Empirical Study On Trainees’ Incoherence Of Consecutive Interpreting Output

Coherence is regarded as a very important attribute of successful consecutiveinterpreting. Incoherent text cannot contribute to better delivery of the message aswell as better communicative results. A number of scholars have discussed the issueof coherence in interpreting, yet there is still a lack of systematic studies concerningthe issue of coherence in interpreting trainees’ output. As potential practitioners in thefield of interpreting, trainees ought to be coherent in their output if they want to do abetter job in the future.This thesis studies the incoherence of interpreting trainees’ consecutiveinterpreting output. Using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as the theoreticalfoundation, the thesis sets out to identify different types of incoherence in trainees’consecutive interpreting output and the triggers for them. To this end,20interpretingtrainees with the language combination of Chinese (A-language) and English(B-language) are involved in an experiment with detailed retrospective interview.It is found that the incoherence of trainees’ consecutive interpreting output iscaused by the changes of rhetorical relations, and incoherence can be categorized intothree types: incoherence caused by the addition of a relation, incoherence caused bythe lack of a relation and incoherence caused by the alteration of a relation. Inincoherence caused by the addition of a relation, trainees may make things up basedon the notes taken; in incoherence caused by the lack of a relation, the most commonones are lacks of Elaboration, lacks of Conjunction and lacks of Evidence; inincoherence caused by the alteration of a relation, changes such as the alteration fromEvidence to Elaboration and the alteration from Non-volitional Result to Elaborationlead to incoherence. The five direct triggers for the changes are listening difficulty,note-reading difficulty, pressure-reducing, comprehension difficulty and explaining.The underlying reasons may include inadequate awareness of coherence, limitedshort-term memory, and limited information processing ability. In the end, suggestions for improvement are made. Results of this research areenlightening for interpreting trainees and may be pedagogically useful.