Improper Self-Repairs And Coping Strategies In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

Studies on self-repairs have been undertaken in the area of language acquisition for a long time before it was introduced into the field of interpretation.In consecutive interpreting,interpreters face multiple challenges and have more autonomy in self-monitoring than in simultaneous mode.Therefore,they are prone to a certain degree of self-repairs.However,excessive self-repairs reduce the fluency and credibility of the output of interpretation.Consequently,it is necessary to analyze the phenomenon and the causes,and to propose effective strategies that can reduce unnecessary self-repairs and improve speech quality.This study focuses on self-repairs in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.The corpus is based on "40th Anniversary of China’s Reform and Opening-up Lecture Series:Challenges and Innovations as China Deepens its Medical Reform" Mock Conference,which the author interpreted for.Firstly,the author summarizes previous research and divides self-repairs into information-related and language-form-related ones.The former category includes different information self-repairs and appropriateness self-repairs,while the latter only includes error repairs,which is further subdivided into grammatical error repairs and phonological error repairs.Secondly,the author selects typical cases from the corpus and discusses the causes.It is concluded that excessive self-repairs are caused by improper or inadequate sorting and integration of the source language information,and low efficiency of the note taking system.Finally,the author proposes three coping strategies.First,allocate more energy to primary than to secondary information and ensure that notes are enough to refresh memories at transitional paragraphs.Second,optimize how notes are taken and maintain basic structure of notes.Third,get more prepared prior to while more flexible during the conference.