Error Analysis Of Student Interpreters' Simultaneous Interpreting From English To Chinese

Error analysis is essential in helping teachers to get a better understanding of students'weaknesses and helping students to identify their own weaknesses,which is an important step forward in enhancing simultaneous interpreting(SI)skills.The research questions are:1.which type of errors is the most prevalent?2.What are the reasons behind errors?3.How frequent omission and inaccurate interpretation occur in four types of sentences?4.How different factors influence fluency and quality?Hence this study is aimed at casting more light on the specific errors students are prone to make and their error frequencies in simultaneous interpreting.The research methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.The research subjects are postgraduate students who major in interpreting from Beijing Foreign Studies University.The author divides errors into three major categories(dysfluency,omission and inaccurate interpretation).Error frequencies are calculated in quantitative analysis and descriptions and analyses of errors are provided in qualitative analysis.A quality assessment is conducted with a view to investgating how the impact of different factors on fluency and quality varies.The results show that dysfluencies were the most frequently committed errors,with inaccurate interpretation witnessing the second highest error rate and omission witnessing the third highest error rate.The impact of pause fillers,repetition and self-correction on fluency is more detrimental than that of the frequency and duration of silent pauses.And the impact of the average duration of clause-interval silent pauses on fluency is more detrimental than that of clause-internal silent pauses.Dysfluencies are not as detrimental as omissions and inaccurate interpretation in compromising quality.Omissions occurred more frequently in simple sentences,while inaccurate interpretation occurred in complex sentences more often.The causes of dysfluencies,omissions and inaccurate interpretation include incomprehension,poor habits of language use,weak preparation capacity,mistakes in the original speech as well as lack of background and thematic knowledge.