A Study Of Self-repair In Chinese To English Consecutive Interpretation

Self-repair is a pervasive language phenomenon in spoken discourse,which has long been of interest to researchers of linguistic and related fields.However,empirical research on self-repair behaviors is far from enough.As a preliminary attempt to examine self-repairs in interpreting practice,this thesis reports a study on self-repairs of 60 English majors in a Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting task in the Oral Test for English Majors-Band 8.Specifically,it aims to explore the general characteristics of self-repairs in oral interpretation output as well as to compare self-repair use among students with different interpreting proficiency levels.The study was a corpus-based study.By going through the tape recordings and transcriptions of the students' interpreting materials,self-repairs occurring in their interpretation output were identified and then extracted manually.They were then categorized and compared.Data analysis has yielded the following findings:1.Self-repairs were used by the students in Chinese-English interpretation to a considerable extent.Among all categories of self-repairs,different information self-repairs were the most frequent,followed by lexical self-repairs,appropriateness repairs,grammatical self-repairs and phonological self-repairs.For some categories of self-repairs(e.g.,different information self-repairs),the number of errors was high while the use of self-repairs was relatively low,which indicates that the students' English proficiency is not high enough for them to detect all or a majority of their errors.The results also reveal that fluency and accuracy could not be attended simultaneously by the student interpreters and they gave priority to accuracy in the interpretation task.2.In general,self-repairs identified in the interpretation corpus were effective with a fairly high accuracy rate.Among all the categories of self-repairs,the highest accuracy rate rested on the grammatical self-repairs,followed by appropriateness self-repairs,lexical self-repairs,phonological self-repairs and different information self-repairs.The findings indicate that the students were largely capable of correcting their own errors once their monitor mechanisms detected these errors.3.Overall,there were differences in the use and the accuracy rate of self-repairs among students with different interpretation proficiency levels.The repair rates and accuracy rates of all categories of the high group were higher than those of the intermediate and low groups.This finding indicates that students with higher interpretation proficiency levels were more inclined to repair the errors in their interpreting output and they were more capable of conducting effective self-repairs.These findings have confirmed the functioning of students' monitoring mechanisms during the oral interpreting process.In the meantime,they may shed some light on the teaching and training of oral interpretation.First,emphasis should be given to the storage of terminologies and formulated sequences so that students can extract lexicons with less hesitation or self-repair.Second,this study reveals that many student interpreters failed to produce grammatically correct sentences,and thus teachers should pay more attention to the syntax in the training of interpretation.