Coping Strategies For The Interpreting Of Long And Complex Sentences In E-C Consecutive Interpreting

The interpreting of long and complex English sentences has always been a challenging task.Different from translation,when interpreters meet a speaker who speaks in an indirect manner and frequently utters sentences with complicated grammatical structures,they have to react quickly and on the spot with not only major information conveyed but also a high level of fluency.Therefore,it is of great necessity to study the interpreting of long and complex English sentences.In this paper,the author carried out an experiment with a speech delivered by Mr.Peter Sutherland at Gresham College as the material and ten MTI students at their second year of postgraduate study at China Foreign Affairs University as the participants.After transcribing the recordings and analyzing the performance,the author summarized the major mistakes ten participants made,which include misinterpreting of information,loss of information,a higher frequency of fillers and unnatural pauses,correction and repetition and weird Chinese expressions.The author also found that loss of logical relations and mess of contextual coherence brought by long and complex sentences are the major reasons behind the poor interpreting.Built upon the analysis,the author put forward some possible coping strategies accordingly,which are active and selective listening,syntactic linearity,omission,conversion of part of speech,summarization and full preparation before interpreting,hoping to give some guidance to interpreting trainees.