Listening Comprehension In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting:Obstacles And Coping Strategies

Listening comprehension is the first and essential step in interpretation.Interpreters should pay high attention to listening comprehension because it can directly impact the quality of interpretation.This paper discusses obstacles to listening comprehension,aimed at finding their causes by dividing them into different types and providing useful strategies to deal with them.The author's consecutive interpretation studied in this paper comes from the 2018 foreign expert Peter Thiel's mock meeting.This paper divided obstacles to listening comprehension into two big types: one type is related to knowledge of the language,including pronunciation recognition obstacles,word comprehension obstacles,sentence comprehension obstacles and text comprehension obstacles;Another type is related to extra-linguistic knowledge,including inadequate background knowledge and imbalanced effort distribution.According to the analyses,this paper proposes some coping strategies.During everyday practices,interpreters should be more familiar with different pronunciations and speeds,collect new words and accumulate background knowledge,and improve their ability of logical analysis.Also,in real practice,interpreters can put more effort in listening comprehension,make reasonable anticipations and communicate with speakers when necessary.In this way,the author hopes to help other interpreters improve their listening comprehension.