Locutionary Factors' Influence On Trainee Interpreters With Different Interpreting Anxiety Degrees In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

Anxiety is universal among interpreting professionals and trainees.Different trainee interpreters have different degrees of anxiety in the interpretation scene.The factors that influence an interpreter also differ.Kang Zhifeng(2011)categorizes the factors that cause interpreting anxiety into locutionary factors and illocutionary factors,this research studies the influence of locutionary factors on the trainee interpreters of different interpreting anxiety(IA)degrees and aims to find out whether the influence differ between the high anxiety and low anxiety trainee interpreters;but the influence explored in this research is not limited to causing IA.31 post-graduate trainee interpreters,whose school entrance year was 2015,from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies were invited.They have taken the systematic course on interpreting for at least one year,which ensured that they had obtained the basic skills of interpreting.At the very beginning these students filled the Interpreting Anxiety Scale.After ranking their scores from high to low,the first 27% of students were selected as high anxiety group and the last 27% as low anxiety group.After the screening,15 trainee interpreters participated in the experiment.The 15 subjects were asked to finished an English-to-Chinese consecutive interpreting task which lasted for 3 minutes or so.After the task was an interview to collect their statements about the influence of the locutionary factors on themselves.The subjects' statements were used for analysis and explanation.The whole experiment,including their interpretation performance and the interview,was recorded.Due to the speaker's accent or speech rate or both,the subjects felt anxious;HA and LA trainee interpreters would miss some information.Some LA trainee interpreters might have difficulty in recognizing just some words in listening.Bilingual knowledge could cause subjects' slower response to the less used words and phrases.More subjects from LA group than HA group claimed that they could deal with the proper names well,because they prepared before the experiment with the pre-task material.Trainee interpreters' bilingual technique influenced trainee interpreters' interpretation production,which caused a broken interpretation or even a “zero” interpretation.But,it seems that LA trainee interpreters are more skillful with their bilingual technique.The turn length of this E-C material hardly had influence on participants.In addition,how a subject feel the turn length might depend on other factors such as the accent and the speech rate.Based on the findings,it can be concluded that the locutionary factors including accent,speech rate,bilingual knowledge,bilingual technique,and turn length influenced the psychological status,listening comprehension,reaction to the vocabulary,etc.The influence of the locutionary factors differed on HA and LA subjects.