An Application Of Retrospective Protocols In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting Training

A consensus exists by many well-experienced interpreters that novice interpreters attach too much importance to the equivalence of lexical meaning rather than focus on what’s conveyed underneath.It will be unfavorable for the interpreting improvement if the problem cannot be solved.As a method of studying the interpreting process,the retrospective protocol is rarely applied in and after class.The reason may be that it takes too long whereas the time in class is limited.Consequently,teachers are more inclined to analyze the interpreting quality or the strategies adopted.After class,most novice interpreters have no idea about how to start a retrospection so they don’t take the initiative to probe into the interpreting process,unable to discover their deficiencies in interpreting.This paper hopes to raise the attention of novice interpreters.By using the retrospective protocol,they can summarize the interpreting performance,find out problem triggers,conduct the targeted training of the error-prone aspects and reflect on their own interpreting performance to continuously improve the interpreting level.In this paper,the retrospective protocol was used to analyze the six participants’ recordings in the experiment.The problems triggers that caused the novice interpreters to make mistakes have been found out and a clear self-evaluation procedure to help them review their interpreting process more effectively has also been demonstrated.Besides,the application in pedagogy is still explorative,aiming at burden reduction and efficiency increase.