How Retelling Parallel Texts Can Help Students Cope With Difficulties In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

During interpretation tasks,interpreters will find various linguistic items particularly difficult:numbers,terms,complex noun phrases,culture-specific items,neologisms and idioms.Therefore,interpretation researchers and professional interpreters have reached the consensus that pre-interpretation preparation is an indispensable part of professional conference interpreters' work.Parallel texts have several guiding roles in such preparations and interpretation training.This study aims to examine how retelling parallel texts can help students cope with difficulties in Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting as a part of pre-interpretation preparation.In the study,16 master students of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation(GSTI),Beijing Foreign Studies University(BFSU)were divided randomly into two groups.The experimental group interpreted the source speech after retelling some parallel texts.The two groups' Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting performances were recorded and transcribed before being classified as different renditions for quantitative analysis.Complex noun phrases,terms and numbers are the main focus of this quantitative analysis.In addition,a qualitative study was also designed.All 16 participants filled out the questionnaire.After a quantitative analysis of the percentages of different renditions in participants'interpretation and a qualitative analysis of the results of the questionnaire,this study concludes that retelling parallel texts can best help students cope with technical terms in Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting.Based on Gile's Effort Model of simultaneous interpretation,retelling parallel texts can alleviate the pressure on all the three Efforts.Second,the influence of retelling parallel texts is mixed on students' handling of complex noun phrases,leading to no significant difference in correct rates but a lower error rate for the experimental group.Third,retelling parallel texts is the least helpful for student interpreters to deal with numbers.The difference of numeral interpretation performance between the experimental group and the control group is not notable.Finally,for technical materials,students can do more efficient preparations by retelling parallel texts.