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1.1 Research Background
AIIC (1994), the International Association of Conference Interpreters defines conference interpreter as follows:
“A conference interpreter is a qualified specialist in bilingual or multilingual communication. S/he makes this communication possible between delegates of different linguistic communities at conferences, meetings, negotiations or visits, where more than one working language is used by comprehending the concepts of the speaker’s message and conveying them orally in another language, either in consecutive, simultaneous or whispering. Besides carrying out a thorough preparation of the subject and terminology, a conference interpreter must possess a wide general knowledge in order to deal with all matters under discussion.”
Generally speaking, conference interpreting is practiced at international summits, professional seminars, and bilateral or multilateral meetings of heads of State and Government. Conference interpreters also work at meetings between chief executives, social and union representatives, at congresses and meetings, and so on. Therefore, conference consecutive interpreters play a significant role in promoting directional understanding as a medium between the audience and the speaker. A high-caliber interpreter can properly and promptly convey the message from the speaker to the audience. A qualified interpreter should not only acquire bilingual competence but also meet the professional standards. In the process of cultivating future professional interpreters, error analysis is always a good researching theory. However, there are few researches conducted on interpreting errors in consecutive interpreting from the professional perspective. Therefore, this study research sets out to identify professional errors made by English major students in a mock conference interpreting. The purpose is to provide suggestions on interpreting teaching and learning.
1.2 Research Significance
Consecutive interpreting is considered as an important and indispensable part on many official occasions. The current market is greatly in want of high-caliber talents in this field. University is one of the places of nurturing those talents. Based on error analysis, this paper helps improve the interpreting teaching by bridging the gap between the interpreting teaching and future career needs.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Current Studies On Conference Consecutive Interpreting Errors
Researches on errors of conference consecutive interpreting mainly involve the linguistic outputs, such as the misuse or improper use of vocabularies and grammar. Wu and Wang did the research on the press conference and analyzed the errors made by senior interpreters. The findings revealed that the errors can be pided into ten types, including “the misuse of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs, the misuse of long sentences, omissions, excessive strong tones, improper use of vocabularies, non-native use of words, the slip of the tone, errors of semantically related words, errors of Chinese-English equivalents, and superfluous interpretation” (Wu Liping & Wang, 2010: 97-100). Among all of them, the improper use of vocabularies and the misuse of long sentences are most commonly made by interpreters. Based on the analysis of the interpretation final examination given to English major students, Lin (2008) put forward a three-level classification for interpretation errors, that is, “lexical level, intra-word level, and syntactic level” (Lin Jie, 2008: 100-102). Meanwhile, the paper pointed out that the types of errors had the cross-category phenomenon. One interpretation might belong to different categories at the same time. Detailed data showed that errors in Chinese-English interpretation is more than those in English-Chinese interpretation, and most of the errors belonged to the lexical and intra-word level, which reflects the interference of mother tongue. Thus, according to those problems, this paper proposed corresponding suggestions for the interpretation education. Jiang took an interpreter studying in Nanjing University as a subject, and considered him as inexperienced but acquiring the knowledge of interpretation theories. According to Danica Seleskovitch’s definition on interpretation and the English-Chinese standards of excellence in TEM8, the analysis pointed out that there were three categories of errors in interpretation, including disfluency of output, inaccurate interpretation, omissions. “The paper indicated that in the preliminary stage of practical interpretation exercises, interpreters should promote the understanding of the text, the memory of the meaning and the exercises of porce from the source language form” (Jiang Wengan, 2012: 75-78).