An Experiment Report On Major Factors Of Information Loss In C-E Consecutive Interpreting

Information loss is one of the most significant problems shared by MTI students in Chinese-English(C-E)consecutive interpreting based on the author’s practices and the survey of other MTI students.Information loss severely impairs the fidelity of interpreting,which is the most critical criterion for interpreting quality assessment.Therefore,this report aims to study information loss in C-E consecutive interpreting process.It is designed to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the major features of information loss in C-E consecutive interpreting?(2)What are the major causes of information loss?In the hope of answering the above-mentioned questions,a TAPs-based experiment prompted by a semi-structured interview is adopted.The TAPs-based experiment is conducted among eight MTI students,including six females and two males.They are the first-year postgraduate students at the time of testing,majoring in interpreting at Shaanxi Normal University.Conclusions are drawn based on the data from the two methods mentioned above.Firstly,the subjects suffer the problem of information loss.The major types of information loss are error and omission,among which error appears more frequently.Based on the analysis of the common features of the information units with high loss rate,the author finds that the information loss mainly occurs when MTI students encounter proper nouns,figures,logic connectives,terminologies,colloquial expressions and high-density information in source speech.Secondly,major causes of information loss include failure to retrieve target language,failure in comprehension of source speech,insufficient memory ability,inappropriate allocation of processing capacity,and poor note-taking skills.The most important reason is the failure to retrieve target language.Thirdly,to reduce information loss,four strategies are put forward,namely enhancing language availability,in-depth analysis,improving note-taking efficiency,and chunking strategy.Through this report,it is hoped that information loss of MTI students in C-E consecutive interpreting will be taken seriously and that some strategies could help them improve interpreting performance.