Factors Influencing The Quality Of Consecutive Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Nowadays, ever-evolving science and technology are spurring needs for transnational exchanges and cooperation, where interpreting service has a big role to play. Consecutive interpreting, as part of the service, is widely provided to facilitate communication in business negotiations, press conferences, public speaking occasions and corporate trainings, among others. As a complex cognitive activity, it requires the interpreter to be able to analyze, memorize and take notes of a specific speech at the same time, and then transform the speech into a language that the audience can understand. Due to the complexity of consecutive interpreting, its quality is subject to various factors. Therefore, it is of practical significance to analyze those factors and then summarize effective coping strategies.This paper is a report on the author’s field practice as a consecutive interpreter. By analyzing some major problems in the practice, the factors undermining the quality of the interpreting will be extracted, which are subject to the speaker and to the interpreter mainly. The factors are generalized as the accent of the speaker and the bilingual competency, consecutive interpreting skills and preparedness of the interpreter. Then, the coping strategy is provided, which requires the interpreter to practice more, expand knowledge, and be more flexible during interpreting. Interpreting ability, knowledge and pre-task preparation are keys to an interpreter’s performance, while most difficulties and challenges that pop up during interpreting can be handled flexibly by the interpreter. In this way, the quality of consecutive interpreting can be improved.