Effects Of Covert Repair Strategies On The Output Fluency In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

This study is to investigate the covert repair,covert repair strategies,and the effect of covert repair strategies on Chinese-English consecutive interpreting output fluency.The covert repair was reframed to take into account the interpreting process.The characteristics of covert repairs were discussed,including the structure,taxonomy,and covert reparability.A covert repair consists of an Original Utterance(OU)in the inner speech and the Alteration in the outer speech;there is no noticeable cut-offs.This paper subdivided covert repairs into three major classes – Morpheme Repairs(MRepairs),Syntax Repairs(S-Repairs)and Rest Repairs(R-Repairs).In response to the taxonomy,covert repair strategies were proposed.“Interpreting Trainee Questionnaire: Output Fluency” was administered;a pretest-posttest C-E CI experiment was conducted with 2 sessions of treatment and 2 rounds of stimulated recall interviews;L2 proficiency tests were carried out.30 participants went through all experiment procedures.Paired Samples T-Tests showed that there was no significant effect of covert repairs strategies on improving C-E CI output fluency(p=0.334>0.05);there was a significant effect of covert repair strategy training(treatment)on enhancing C-E CI output fluency(p=0.008<0.05).Pearson Correlation Analysis revealed insignificant correlation between L2 proficiency and CE CI output fluency(p=0.446>0.05).However,33.93% of overt repairs were covertly repairable.This implied the potential of covert repairs in enhancing output fluency.Results suggested that appropriate attentional allocation and sensitivity towards the grammatical properties could reduce covert unrepairable errors so that the covert repair strategies could be utilized to improve C-E CI output fluency.