Self-repairs In Consecutive Interpreting

This thesis explores self-repairs in both Chinese-English and English-Chineseconsecutive interpreting (CI) from a psycholinguistic perspective. As a result ofself-monitoring, self-repair could provide further evidence for the self-monitoringmechanism and help to reflect upon the difficulties during the production ofinterpreting. Levelt’s self-monitoring model and self-repair taxonomy as well asGile’s Effort Model for Consecutive Interpreting are introduced as the theoretical base.Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected from theexperiment involving10interpreting trainees and the discussion of the answersinduced from the "stimulated recall" interviews as well as the questionnaire, thisresearch attempts to identify different types of self-repairs in CI, the trouble triggersin these repairs and the repairing patterns in CI production in order to further revealthe features of self-repairs in CI and the ways of making repairs by interpreters.The findings of this research show that both overt and covert self-repairs can befound in the CI production. Repair for appropriateness is the major type of self-repairsin CI and interpreters make more repairs on the lexical level than on the syntacticlevel. In CI production, the trouble triggers can be divided into the input sourcetriggers and output formulation triggers. The input source triggers such as the note,the understanding of the original speech and the recalling of the message in thememory could cause troubles in the output process. At the same time, interpreterstend to make repairs as soon as they detect the troubles. The patterns of self-repairs inCI depend on the nature of the troubles as well as on the language directions. Thefindings of this research further prove that interpreters not only monitor their internaland overt speech but also detect the troubles and make self-repairs accordingly.