Relieving effects of prefabricated chunks in conference interpreting from English to Chinese in an ELF context

Abstract

ABSTRACT English has become a lingua franca worldwide including among multilinguals across Asia. Influenced by local languages and diversified cultures, English in Southeast Asia has formed unique linguistic variations. These may interfere with interpreters’ listening comprehension and instantaneity during the interpreting process and may have a detrimental effect on target text output. However, studies of corpus linguistics reveal that in natural languages a large number of prefabricated chunks stored in memory can be retrieved directly without lexical or grammatical analysis. The new perspective of prefabricated chunks calls for fresh approaches to listening for interpreting in a context of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). This paper aims to explore how knowledge of prefabricated chunks achieves relieving effects by easing cognitive constraints in listening comprehension during the CI phase of conference interpreting from English into Chinese in an ELF context. The paper is based on a comparative study involving two groups of trainee interpreters to interpret an extract of an English speech with a strong Lao accent into Chinese. Their interpreting performance was assessed and compared by conducting a quantitative analysis of data records and semi-structured interviews with the interpreters. The research would shed light on interpreter education in an ELF context.