The Impacts Of Mental Stress On The Interpreter's Performance In Consecutive Interpreting

The profession of interpreter has been regarded as one of the most challenging and demanding professions,which requires not only excellent bilingual proficiency,a large pool of encyclopedic knowledge,but also strong psycho-physiological competence to tackle the huge mental stress head on.This report is based on the author's consecutive interpreting practices on three occasions under IBM's “The Smarter Cities Challenge” Huizhou Program.The first part of the report introduces the background information and an overview of the program in which the author worked.The second part describes the entire process including applying for the post,making pre-task preparations,carrying out the interpreting tasks and having post-task evaluation.And the third part mainly analyzes the sources of mental stress for the interpreter from three dimensions,namely the speakers,the audience and the interpreter,with reference to the Lazarus' s Appraisal Model,Gile's Effort Model and Seleskovitch's Triangular Model in the Interpretive Theory,and then presenting the impacts of mental stress on the interpreter's performance.In the final part of the report,the author summarizes the physiological,cognitive manifestations and the manifestations of the rendition quality under the adverse impacts of mental stress as well as the author's reflections on ways to cope with mental stress,such as having effective and sufficient pre-task preparations,activating self-efficacy with a positive attitude towards the task.It is the author's hope that this report could be a conducive and constructive reference for student interpreters or rookie interpreters in improving their on-site interpreting performance through assuaging the negative impacts of mental stress.