Tracking And Comparison Of Interpreting Competence And Foreign Language Competence In Conference Interpreter Training

Since its commencement in the west at the end of 1950s, interpreter training has been stressing that what it fosters and improves is interpreting competence rather than foreign language competence, which is necessary but inadequate for one to become an interpreter, while in the current scenario of interpreter training in China, there still exist teaching practices which take foreign language teaching methods as effective for interpreter training. Competence research in literature on interpreting focuses on expert-novice paradigm and little empirical effort has been made to investigate the route from a novice to an expert , while research on language issues in interpreting studies mainly revolves around directionality and B language enhangcement for simultaneous interpreting. Therefore more research on intepreting competence and foreign language competence is needed.This dissertation makes an empirical study of both interpreting competence and foreign language competence and proposes research questions and research hypotheses after defining key concepts in this research project.This dissertation is one of the first attempts to examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, whether both interpreting competence and foreign language competence will improve through interpreter training. The researcher takes one group of first-year and one group of second-year conference interpreting students as subjects, and endeavours to meausre and compare their interpreting competence and foreign language competence during different phases of their consecutive interpreting training. The meausurement of foreign language competence takes the forms of mock IELTS tests, and interpreting competence is examined through consecutive interpreting tests from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English. Neither statistical analysis between scores of two mock IELTS tests of the first-year students nor that between scores of the two groups of students yields significant difference, while statistical analysis between scores of the two groups of students'consecutive interpreting tests yields the opposite result.Detailed analysis of students'interpreting performance demonstrates that major differences between the two groups lie in their respective quantities of primary information interpreted; in their effectiveness in distinguishing primary and secondary information; in their effectiveness in deverbalizing the message; in their monitoring of interpreting production, and in rendering the message successfully when information density increases or when the logical structure in the source-language speech gets more complicted, all the which belong to the domain of interpreting competence, which can only be trained and improved through specialized interpreting training rather than through foreign language training. Thus the necessity of independent interpreter traning is empirically validated.Comparision between first-year students'performance in their aptitude test from Chinese to English and in their consecutive interpreting tests in the same language direction at the end of the semester reveals that students tend to commit more errors in rendering the primary inforamation, in production monitoring, and in B language performance in their consecutive interpreting tests, which implies that students'performance tends to deteriorate after some time of interpreter training because they haven't yet successfully acquired interpreting skills and achieved a balance among different compence components needed when faced with more specialized speeches and higher competence management requirements. By comparison, second-year students, who have successfully finished the consecutive phase of conference interpreter training, manifest an obviously higher level of interpreting competence. Thus a U shape route can be discerned in students'consecutive phase of interpreter training. The two groups of students exhibit similar features in their foreign language tests but obvious differences in their B language performance, which means that foreign language competence and B language competence cannot be taken as the same.This dissertation is one of the first attempts to empirically study interpreting competence and B language competence in the context of specialized interpreter training by adopting both observational and experimental methods. The initial results of this dissertation are of relevance to both specialzied interpreter training and foreign language teaching.