Strategies To Deal With English Varieties

Difficulties caused by English Varieties are unavoidable in English-Chinese interpreting,and speeches with strong accents tend to affect interpreter’s listening and understanding.This paper summarized a set of strategies to deal with English Varieties based on literature research and the author’s interpreting experience and proved the effectiveness of those strategies through empirical study of interpretation,aiming to provide some practical coping strategies for prospective interpreters or interpreting learners.In the experiment,the author took phonetic variation as the entry point and selected ten TED-talk speech videos as testing materials,controlling various factors affecting interpretation quality,including text difficulty,types of speech,duration and speed,etc.Eight MTI interpreting students were trained intensively for five times,adopting strategies summarized in the paper,focusing on adaptive training of phonetic distortion.They were tested with an Indian accent speech and a Standard English speech after each training.Completeness and accuracy of their interpretation outputs were assessed quantitatively,and changes of their mindset were analyzed qualitatively based on pre-test and post-test questionnaires.The experimental results confirmed that applying the coping strategies summarized in this paper,the subjects’ interpretation qualities of Indian accent speeches have been obviously improved;that after a short-term training,the subjects held a more positive attitude towards English Varieties;and identified that interpreting learners all expressed their willingness to continue learning English Varieties and conduct targeted trainings.Thus,the experimental results are of great practical significance for English-Chinese interpreting practice and of referential value for interpretating teaching.