A Contrastive Study Of Errors Made By Student Interpreters With Single And Double Native Languages In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

In this study,subjects are students with one native language,Chinese and students with double native languages,English and Chinese.Error analysis theory and error analysis framework are adopted to make a contrastive study of student interpreters' performance in English-Chinese consecutive interpretation.After the corpus is collected,the recordings are transcribed into texts,and errors in the texts are then labeled and classified into different error categories.The author calculates errors and generates Excel tables and figures demonstrating error intensity and error density.Qualitative study and quantitative study were carried out to analyze different errors.Reasons are explored combining error diagnosis method and feedback from the student interpreters.It is found in the study that the two groups demonstrated no obvious differences in error categories,but the intensity and density of errors made by the group with Chinese as single native language are higher than the other group.When it comes to characteristics of errors,both groups make more mistakes when the sentences are long,complex and requires background knowledge.Both groups suffer more from intralingual influences than interlingual influences,but intralingual influence the group with double native languages suffers is greater than the other group.According to feedbacks from student interpreters,memory and note-taking also weigh huge influence over their performance.It is then concluded that in the early stage of consecutive training,many factors lead to errors,such as intralingual influence,interlingual influence,note-taking,memory,stress and lacking background knowledge.Student interpreters should focus on the abovementioned factors and train accordingly,while teachers should also design syllabus accordingly to help student interpreters improve.