Analysis On Interpretation Errors Of MTI Students

The learning process of human being is a continuous process o f making errors.In the learning process, people gain experience from the errors, hence their skillsimprove. As student interpreters, we also constantly make errors, reflect on theerrors, gain experience, so that our ability of interpretation can be improved. In thefield of second language acquisition, the method of error analysis has been widelyadopted, however, it was relatively less used in the field of interpretation. Inparticular, there was almost no paper about error analysis of several subjects duringone interpreting activity as far as the writer knows. Analysis on the interpretingerrors not only helps MTI students to improve their interpreting ability but is also ofgreat significance for interpreting teaching and research.This is an experiment study about MTI students’ interpreting errors. Thesubjects of study are10MTI students from Hunan University. The writer observedtheir performance during a classical music festival, analyzed their interpretingrecordings, collected questionnaires from them and investigated25other MTIstudents to test the result. Before the study, the writer did an interpreting test amongthe total35students and proved their interpreting ability to be almost on the samelevel. The purpose of the study is to find out the main interpretation errors of MTIstudents, focusing on top5errors of the highest frequency, and their causes as well.Suggestions and guide will thus be given to the interpreting learners and teachers.The results show that the top5most frequent interpreting errors are repetition,pause and omission of source language, inappropriate choice of words andinformation mistake.The main causes of interpreting errors are psychologicalpressure, poor note-taking ability, poor memory, unavailability of proper targetlanguage, and misunderstanding of the source speech. Therefore, interpreters shouldadopt corresponding strategies to improve their language competence in both Englishand Chinese, relieve their psychological pressure and anxiety in interpreting, andenhance note-taking skill and memory training, so as to improve overall interpretingabilities. Interpreting teaching should lay more emphasis on the above relevantfactors, for the purpose of improving students’ language proficiency and interpretingability, and help cultivate them into potential competent interpreters.