A Case Study On Consecutive Interpreting Improvement In Light Of Gile's Effort Model

This is a practice report on a Chinese-English consecutive interpreting for a presentation given at the "2017 Seminar on Modern Agriculture and Food Security for Developing Countries".It summarizes lessons of this task and offers strategies and coping tactics in the hope of providing guidance for improvement of interpreting quality in the future.The report is divided into four parts.The first part introduces the task briefly.The second part consists of process description,It describes the preparation before interpreting,the interpreting process and the post-task evaluation and self-reflection.The interpreting process part discusses how the task was carried out and what challenges the author encountered and what coping tactics were utilized in detail.The third part elaborates on case study.Under the guidance of Gile's Effort Model of consecutive interpreting,the report shares some typical examples and analyzes problems from two perspectives:the inappropriate allocation of available processing capacity and problem triggers raising the total processing capacity requirements.The fourth part summarizes three findings.Firstly,during interpreting,note-taking is the main reason for inappropriate allocation of available processing capacity.So interpreters have to bear in mind the principle that“listening and comprehension comes first,memory second and notes last".Besides,three suggestions are useful,namely,active listening or analytical listening,increasing memory capacity by recalling without notes,and forming a good habit of note-taking:"analysis before note-taking".Secondly,interpreters have to acquire coping tactics consciously in daily practice so as to better address the rising processing capacity requirements caused by problem triggers.Thirdly,interpreters have to improve language competence and listening skills and enhance extra-linguistic knowledge to improve the total available processing capacity and reduce the total processing capacity requirement.