Information Loss And Coping Strategies In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Consecutive interpreting is one of the types of interpreting.It requires interpreters to accurately and completely deliver all the information of the source speeches in clear and natural TL.Affected by the intense mental activities,stress from the conference environment and other factors,interpreters are liable to create information loss while interpreting.Although currently there are many researches of interpreting information loss,most are specific to simultaneous interpreting and adopts English-Chinese corpus.Consecutive interpreting differs from simultaneous interpreting in many aspects.Consequently,the information loss of consecutive interpreting has its own characteristics and coping approaches,which needs further studies.The author conducted analyses on the basis of Daniel Gile's Comprehension Equation C=KL+EKL+A and Effort Models,and tried to answer the following questions.The questions include: firstly,types of information loss in consecutive interpreting;secondly,strategies and methods to deal with information loss in consecutive interpreting;thirdly,causes of information loss.The corpus of this study adopted the material and transcriptions of the mock conference of MTI consecutive interpreting course.The author transcribed students' interpretations and find out information losses for further quantitative and qualitative analysis.According to the transcriptions and the feedback reports of the subjects,the author categorized the information loss as the interpreting omissions at linguistic level,the interpreting omissions at extralinguistic level,morphological errors,syntactic errors,the misuse of words and phrases and other types of error.On the basis of the statistics and Gile's Comprehension Equation and Effort Models,the author holds that the major causes that can lead to information loss include high information density of the SL text,saturation of attentional resources,insufficient note-taking skills,inadequate working language competence and insufficient memory ability.In the end,several coping strategies were put forward,namely minimizing the processing capacity requirement of each Effort and optimizing the attentional resources allocation.Specific strategies embody the improvement of linguistic,note-taking and working competence and the mastery of reasonable segmentation of the SL text.