Self-repairs Of Student Interpreters In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

As a common phenomenon in both spontaneous speech and interpreting,self-repairs are the overt manifestations of the inner monitoring mechanism during the speech production process.From the perspective of psycholinguistic,this thesis adopts an observational approach to carry out a descriptive research on the phenomenon of self-repairs made by student interpreters in the English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.It aims to explore the types of self-repairs in student interpreters' English-Chinese consecutive interpreting and the techniques that they use to initiate self-repairs.In accordance with the purpose of this research,three research questions are put forward: 1)How many categories of self-repairs of student interpreters can be observed from the self-built corpus of English-Chinese consecutive interpreting? 2)What is the distribution pattern of student interpreters' self-repairs? 3)What initiation techniques are used by student interpreters to make self-repairs? To answer these questions,the author has built a corpus based on the recordings of the English-Chinese consecutive interpreting part of the All China Interpreting Contest National Final in 2014,2015 and 2016.Through the observation of the corpus and based on the classifications of self-repairs proposed by scholars of previous researches,the author proposes a classification of self-repairs for English-Chinese consecutive interpreting participated by student interpreters.Through calculating the data and combining Levelt's(1983)self-monitoring model and Gile's(1995)Effort Model of consecutive interpreting,the author analyzes the phenomenon of self-repairs in the corpus and concludes the distribution pattern of self-repair types of student interpreters.Lastly,by observing the corpus,the author concludes the initiation techniques used by student interpreters and carries out a statistical discussion on the initiation techniques.The findings further prove the prevalent existence of self-repairs in student interpreters' English-Chinese consecutive interpreting in this corpus,but the frequency of making self-repairs varies from person to person.There are three major types of overt self-repairs,namely different information repair(D-repair),appropriateness repair(A-repair)and error repair(E-repair).E-repair is the most frequently made repair,closely followed by A-repair;D-repair presents the least proportion.More E-repairs are made at lexical level than at phonetic and syntactic levels.Among all the subtypes of self-repairs,the proportion of AL(appropriate level repair)takes the lead.In terms of initiation techniques of self-repairs,five initiation techniques are observed,namely cut-off,filled pause,lengthened syllable,word search marker and repetition.The initiation techniques used the most frequently by student interpreters are cut-off and filled pause.The proper use of word search marker can gain more time for student interpreters and at the same time maintain the flow of their output to the maximum degree,but it is remarkably underused.Student interpreters are suggested to lay stress on the use of word search marker in their interpreting trainings.In the meantime,given that filled pauses will affect the fluency of the output,student interpreters are suggested to reduce the use of filled pauses in their interpreting training.