A Study On Chunk In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting Among Interpreting Trainees

The term chunk is derived from psychology.After the introduction of prefabricated chunks,they have entered the field of linguistic research and gradually become a research hotspot.Overseas research on chunks focuses on second language acquisition.In recent years,research on chunks and interpretation teaching has gradually increased.Previous studies tend to focus on phrasal chunks and interpreters’ output.In this paper,the study of chunks is divided into the following three levels:Chinese source text and the official translation,official translation and interpretation by interpreting trainees,interpretation of higher-level interpreters and lower-level interpreters.According to the characteristics of this study,the author proposes an appropriate definition of a chunk:a continuous or non-continuous prefabricated structure composed of words or other meaningful components with fixed meanings and certain grammatical,discourse,and pragmatic functions.Chunks are classified into four categories:phrase,collocation,idiom,and sentence builder.Phrases are divided into noun+prepositional phrase,verb+noun+prepositional phrase,adjective+noun phrase.This study takes an excerpt of a speech in volume II of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China as the source language material.Interpreting data are collected through a test and the testing audio is read by the author at a normal.Participants are MTI students majoring in English interpretation from the School of English and International Studies,Beijing Foreign Studies University.Through the New Class system,data are downloaded and divided into 2 groups according to the interpreting level.Then data are transcribed by the iFlyTEK’s voice recognition system.After that,the author proofread the text again,extracted chunks from clear and complete transcriptions,then classified and summarized them to form tables.Based on the calculation and comparative analysis of the number of blocks,it is found that the numbers of the chunk in the source text and the official translation are 86 and 91 respectively.This shows that the gap in total number of chunks in the source text and official translation are small and more than two-thirds of them are corresponding to each other.The average number of chunks in the student interpreters’ texts is 65.85.If the repetition and error blocks are excluded,the average number is 52.3,among which the number of chunks identical with those in the official translation is 37,indicating that the student interpreters have insufficient awareness of chunk usage.At the same time,the student interpreters of higher level are better than those of lower level in all categories of chunks in terms of number and correct rate.In addition,this paper also reflects on the shortcomings of the imperfect theoretical framework and data collection process and puts forward corresponding suggestions for similar research in the future.