Redundancy And Its Coping Strategies In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Unnecessary information(redundancy)is a common problem in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting.It goes against the purpose of interpretation as a way to facilitate communication because it easily makes audience confused and impatient.According to previous research,linguistic differences between Chinese and English,misuse of interpreting skills and limited language capabilities are all possible reasons for redundant expressions.The author was a consecutive interpreter at a mock conference of the between Lin Yifu and Zhang Weiying.Redundancy was a major problem in the author's English interpretation,including fillers,repetitions,overloaded sentences and unnecessary explanations.There were four reasons:lack of background knowledge,useless notes due to inactive listening,over usage of redundancy as a coping strategy in order to keep a quick pace,and limited expressions in English as a foreign language.Accordingly,there are four coping strategies to make the interpretation more concise and precise.The first is to increase background knowledge by improving the interpreting preparation before conferences and by using omission rather than redundancy as a coping strategy.The second is to listen more actively so that interpreters can avoid taking down useless notes in the first place.The third is to change coping strategy to buy time from adding redundancy to taking pauses or slowing down the pace.The last is to improve English by dealing with personal weaknesses.