Time Control In Arabic-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting:Causes And Coping Strategies

Interpretation is a type of translation that provides communication service for two or more parties with different languages and cultures.The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting.In consecutive interpreting,the duration of interpreting time being longer than expected is a common phenomenon,especially when interpreting from the mother tongue to a foreign language.Time control in interpretation is an important point that every student interpreter needs to take care of to be a professional interpreter.Although the length of the interpreting time might not be a decisive factor in the interpreting process,its importance to the overall interpretation cannot be ignored.In Arabic to Chinese consecutive interpreting,listening and comprehension don't cause problems for native speakers of Arabic.However,due to a variety of other reasons,including linguistic and non-linguistic reasons,the interpreter may take too much time to interpret,which affects the interpretation quality to a certain extent.The purpose of this paper is to point out the reasons why the duration of interpreting could take longer than it is supposed to while interpreting from mother tongue into foreign language,by the analysis of the mock conference of the "Fourth ASBAR International Forum in 2019-‘Future City' Symposium".The reasons include: lack of Chinese language proficiency,insufficient response to numbers,improper pauses,self-correction and other non-fluency factors,note-taking problems,and lack of preparation before translation.Then the paper put forward the coping strategies that can be adopted to shorten the output time and ensure the fluency of the target language,including training and long-term accumulation,reducing pauses and self-correction and other non-fluency factors,optimizing notes,and full preparation before interpretation.During this mock conference,the speakers spoke at a moderate rate,but when interpreting,the time that the author took to interpret was still longer than the source language time.Therefore,in this thesis,the author tries to use this mock conference as a case to explore the reasons of this problem and the effective coping strategies for it.