The Effect Of Delayed Span Of Time On Advanced L2 Learners' E-C Consecutive Interpreting Performances

As the bridge of cross-cultural communication and cooperation,interpretation carries the increasingly significance in the open world.Interpretation study has attracted the attention of many scholars and researchers in the past decades,and many theses around the topic have been published.However,delayed span of time in consecutive interpreting has not been involved in researches yet.This study attempts to explore the interesting issue and make some small contribution to the interpreting study and practice.The study centered on the effect of delayed span of time on the quality of outputs in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting among student interpreters.The experiment was designed to figure out the following questions:1.What is the relationship between delayed span of time and performance of English-Chinese consecutive interpreting?2.Is there an optimal delayed span of time suitable for English-Chinese consecutive interpreting?If there is one,what is the superiority?Twelve advanced second language learners were involved in the English-Chinese consecutive interpreting experiment and the materials were matching the interpreting ability of the research subjects.The delayed spans of time were set to three to five seconds,eight to ten seconds and thirteen to fifteen seconds respectively during the experiment.Through the experiment and data analysis,the research yields several findings:1.Delayed span of time and interpreting performance are nonlinear related.Information omissions are increasing with extended delayed span while linguistic errors are declining.2.The eight-to-ten-second delayed span is most suitable for advanced L2 learners.Without huge time and short-term memory pressure,interpreters can bring out the best performance in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.Meanwhile,awkward silence will be avoided.The pedagogical implications drawn from the study will be applied to the training of student interpreters,to help them obtain the better time and efforts management and energy attribution and to achieve the ideal performance during the English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.