A Research On Student Interpreters’ Errors In Medical Interpreting

This thesis is a case study evolving around the interpretation errors of student interpreters in simulated consultation interpreting scenarios,aiming to analyze its underlying causes,and explore the path for student interpreters to become professional medical interpreters.The author took part in the third session of the medical interpretation workshop of SITS in GDUFS,and collected the recordings of the courses where students acted as liaison interpreters for simulated consultations.The recorded material was transcribed and analyzed through comparing the ostensive information and inferential intention of source text and target text.In the field of interpreting’s quality assessment,error analysis plays a pivotal role,among which more focuses are put on the errors in conference interpretation while less research is about the errors in community interpretation,so this paper endeavors to add supplementary insight towards consultation interpreting.At the same time,the gap exists between an urgent need for medical interpreting and the scarcity of competent medical interpreters,so it is essential to bring up more professional medical interpreters.In light of this situation,this paper is anchored to analyze the errors of student interpreters and provide suggestions for subsequent learning,so as to make professionals out of student interpreters.In this paper,descriptive analysis and interviews were used to find errors committed by student interpreters in consultation interpreting and to dig out its underlying reasons.Based on source-target text analysis,three types of errors: omission,addition and substitution,were found to be the most common ones.Based on the interviews,it can be found that due to limited mutual knowledge,insufficient recognition of medical interpreter’s role,and inadequate language competence,student interpreters failed to fully restore the discourse information,and maintain the communicative intentions between patients and doctors.Therefore,the lecturing of medical knowledge and the cultivation of students’ awareness of medical interpreter’s role should be focused in future medical training.