A Report Of Analytical Listening Difficulties And Coping Measures In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

As the first step in consecutive interpretation,analytical listening directly determines whether the meaning of the source language can be correctly conveyed or not.It is not only a crucial part,but also a difficult one for interpreters.This practice report discusses the current interpreter's simulation consecutive interpretation of a Harvard University's open course Positive Psychology.After analyzing the difficulties of analytical listening in this practice,the interpreter finds that the obstacles of analytical listening mainly occur at the linguistic level and extra-linguistic level.The analytical listening difficulties at the linguistic level can be divided into obstacles of sound,vocabulary,and grammar.Specifically,the different voices of four speakers and the relatively high speaking speed add difficulties to sound recognition;the lecture involves a lot of psychological content,so the new words in this field increase the difficulty of understanding;the complex grammatical structure of long sentences is also the obstacle of listening interpreting.Besides,The extra-linguistic difficulties of listening and interpreting can be summarized into two parts.One is the interpreter's insufficient knowledge,which leads to incomprehension of the original information;the other is too much energy of the interpreter put in the note-taking,which leads to the neglect of analytical listening.The coping measures are put forward for the difficulties mentioned above,including strengthening language competence and focusing on short-term preparation before interpreting activities and long-term accumulation of encyclopedic knowledge;taking the “narration” approach to interpret the content that you don't hear or understand;distinguishing between primary information and secondary information and grasping relatives when listening to long complex sentences.In addition,it is highly important to learn how to appropriately allocate some of the interpreters' energy into note-taking in consecutive interpreting and improve the ways of note-taking.Hopefully this thesis can provide reference for other interpreters to dealwith the analytical listening difficulties.