Self-repair In C-E Simultaneous Interpreting:a Comparative Study Of Professional And Student Interpreters

Self-repair study has been developed and enriched ever since the advent of the concept.While many scholars have examined self-repair in L1 and L2,and some insightful conclusions have been drawn for self-repair in interpreting,comparative studies that investigate the repair performance of different groups varied in expertise in interpreting are rarely seen.This paper,based on Levelt's self-repair theory,examines the commonality and discrepancy of self-repair between professional and student interpreters in simultaneous interpreting,including repair forms,motivations,signals and strategies to draw more plausible and realistic training guidance for student interpreters to speed up their progression into professionalism.To that end,seven professional and seven student participants joined the experiment of a 12-minute CE simultaneous interpreting test with follow-up retrospective interviews to identify repairs and confirm motivations and other aspects.418 repairs were identified and investigated.Results show that the two groups varied in expertise present a similar ranking of each repair form,motivations and signal,however,their sizes differ.Students have a greater proportion of fresh start and pause/filler/repetition in repair forms.In terms of covert,appropriate level repairs and syntactic error repairs in repair motivations,students also present a larger share.But a smaller number of disguises in repair signals are found in the student corpus as opposed to their professional counterparts,whereas their repair rate and validity remain lower.The results expose students' incompetency of repair strategies and basic language skills and less awareness of the listener's continuation problem in simultaneous interpreting.To achieve greater professionalism,students are advised to have three parallel focuses:basic linguistic capability,repair strategies and simultaneous interpreting techniques.