An Experiment Report On The Effects Of Long And Difficult English Sentences On MTI Trainee Interpreters’ Performance In Consecutive Interpreting

Long and difficult English sentences are very challenging for both translation and interpretation.While in translation,a considerable amount of time is dedicated to polishing the wording and phrasing of the text,promptness becomes the primary requirement in interpretation.The interpreter must respond quickly in a short period and ensure high accuracy and fluency of the interpretation.Long and difficult English sentences bring difficulty to interpreting tasks,interpreters’ listening comprehension,short-term memory,and expression have great effects on their interpreting performances.This experiment report is intended to study the effects of long and difficult English sentences on MTI Trainee Interpreters’ Performance in consecutive interpreting and the reasons inducing errors.The experiment takes two speeches made by Angelina Jolie in 2017 and 2019 as experimental materials and invites 12 students majoring in interpreting to conduct the simulated consecutive interpreting of the speeches.After the experiment,the subjects are interviewed one after another.The experiment mainly focuses on forty long and difficult English sentences selected from the two speeches.The total number of words and complicated components in sentences are counted up.Through the transcripts of the recorded interpreting and interviews,the author sums up major errors subjects frequently made in the process of the interpretation and analyzes in combination with Daniel Gile’s Effort Model.The experiment shows that misinterpreting,loss of information,repetition,and pauses frequently occur in the process of interpreting long and difficult English sentences.The frequency of errors is found to be positively correlated with the increasing number of words in the sentence and the use of more complicated structures.This,in turn,has a negative effect on accuracy,completeness,and fluency,therefore lowering the quality of the interpretation.Errors are mainly caused by difficult words and complex structures,such as country names,proper nouns,figures,attributive clauses,adverbial clauses,prepositional phrases,and participial phrases.These sentences are information-intensive and contain complicated grammar structures,which can display significant differences between English and Chinese.A large amount of information they carry and the use of complicated sentence structures negatively affect listening comprehension and short-term memory and exert a tremendous mental burden on the interpreter.Therefore,at the end of this report,the author proposes four interpreting strategies to deal with long and difficult English sentences in order to lessen errors in output,including syntactic linearity,division,omission,and re-adjustment.The author also introduces the methods for improving note-taking from the perspective of logical analysis,enlarging encyclopedic knowledge and making full preparations before the interpreting tasks.With this experiment,the author hopes to provide some guidance for interpreters to understand complicated structures better and improve the capability of listening comprehension,logical analysis,and note-taking.Moreover,some interpreting strategies for dealing with such sentences are introduced to release the pressure for interpreters and enhance the quality of interpretation.