Self-Repair In Trainee Interpreters’ Two-Way Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

In interpreting,self-repair refers to interpreter’s adjustment of their utterances to match the output against fitness.It is a common phenomenon in interpreting and also serves as an important interpreting strategy.However,the study of self-repair in Chinese and English interpreting is comparatively limited compared with other language pairs.This paper investigates self-repair in both C-E and E-C consecutive interpreting based on data from the 8th All China Interpreting Contest National Final.The frequency and distribution patterns of different self-repair types are presented in this study to identify the differences and similarities between the two directions.The typology of self-repairs in spontaneous speech from previous scholars serves as the rudimentary classification used in this paper.Several adjustments are made to further complete it or suit the corpus in this study.There are three major types of self-repairs:appropriateness repairs(A-repair),error repairs(E-repair)and different information repairs(D-repairs).Subjects of this paper are 25 contestants who joined both the C-E section and E-C section of the 8th All China Interpreting Contest National Final.The audio recordings of the competition are transcribed and manually checked.All of the detected self-repairs are annotated and counted in Microsoft Word.Based on statistical analyses of results,the following conclusions are made:1)the respective total amount of self-repairs in the two directions made by trainee interpreters are close;2)trainee interpreters make more self-repairs for appropriateness when interpreting into Chinese(33%)than into English(16%);3)trainee interpreters make more syntactic error repairs than other types of error repairs in both directions.Suggestions for the training of student interpreters are provided based on the findings of this paper.