Typology of mistakes in consecutive interpretations and the way to overcome and eliminating them

§3.2. Overcoming and eliminating of mistake in consecutive interpretation
Interpreting is “an ancient human practice that predates the invention of writing and (written) translation” (Pöchhacker, 2004). As long as there is intercultural communication, there is a need for interpreting. With globalization and development of world business, the demand for interpreters is growing rapidly, particularly in the economic arena, where people need to communicate and negotiate across cultures in order to accomplish their financial needs.
In the field of interpreting, EA is considered as a tool for evaluating the performance of interpreters by considering the accuracy and completeness (Falbo, 2015). Analysing errors is beneficial to understanding problem triggers of the processing capacity of student interpreters (Wang, 2015). In Altman’s (1994) study, the most frequent types of errors in SI made by student interpreters include “omissions, additions, inaccurate renditions of individual text items and distortions of longer phrases”. Chang (2018) studied the linguistic features of Uzbek-English short CI test and identified grammatical and lexical errors in student interpreters’ recordings. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to identify the relationship between directionality and error types by student interpreters in CI.
The term ‘consecutive interpreting’ came into use after 1920s (Baigorri-Jalón, 2014), and is used in opposition to simultaneous interpreting by the classification based on the working mode. According to Gile’s effort models (2009), CI differs from SI in that the former involves note-taking in Phase 1 and note-reading in Phase 2. Because of this, studies on note-taking dominated the literature of CI. The most extensively researched aspects in note-taking include note-taking skills and techniques (Campos & Salinas, 2016; Chen, 2017; Lung, 1999), language choice in note-taking, and the relationship between working memory and note-taking.
The pedagogical aspect is also a primary concern in CI. On the one hand, different approaches in teaching CI were studied: Ilg & Lambert (1996) adopted the pragmatic approach and the cognitive justification to analyse the teaching process of CI; Hönig (2011) used text mappings in the analysis of teaching CI. On the other hand, some empirical studies were carried out to probe into the more subtle aspects of teaching CI. Li (2013) examined how the teachers’ strategy use affected the students’ training in CI classroom. Yenkimaleki & van Heuven(2018) investigated the influence of teaching prosodic feature awareness on the performance of interpreters. Prioritizing instructional objectives in course design is shown to implement a CI course, and students' wants and lacks were taken into consideration in prioritizing the objectives (Xiangdong Li, 2018).
Most studies on CI focused on note-taking and pedagogical aspects. The errors of interpreters in CI between English and Uzbek have rarely been examined. This study seeks to categorize error types in consecutive interpreting (CI) among student interpreters between English and Uzbek. The research questions are: What errors do student interpreters frequently make in the product phase of CI; and what are the differences between the error types in two directions in the product of student interpreters in CI?
The instruments used in this study include audio recordings of students' interpreting in the final exam of Business Interpreting course. The source English speech lasts 57 seconds with about 132 words, while the source Uzbek speech is 43 seconds and contains about 157 Uzbek characters. According to the requirements of Advanced English Interpretation Test in Uzbekistan, the number of words for each text for the test is 120~150. Therefore, the length of the materials chosen for the final exam is appropriate for the current study.
One of the parameters in assessing the difficulty of a text is information density. It is determined by the proportion of the number of propositions to the number of total words: the higher the score, the denser the information (Liu & Chiu, 2009). A proposition is the smallest meaningful unit (Solso et al., 2014:11) that contain a predicate (“relational concept”) and one or more arguments, with the predicate specifying the relationship between the arguments (concepts) (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978). The arguments of a proposition may be “agent, object, and goal”. Predicates may include “verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and sentence connectives” .
The participants of this study are four undergraduate students majoring in English in their seventh semester pursuing English in a Namangan state university. As Bartłomiejczyk (2015) pointed out, it is rare to find interpreters who are bilingual from childhood and, therefore, can mediate between two native languages. Most interpreters have a few working languages, only one of which is native, referred to as an A language or L1 in the classification by AIIC. Thus, after about 12 years of learning English, English majors in Uzbekistan can be said to be bilinguals with Uzbek as their L1 and English as their L2.
There are altogether 32 students in this class, with 4 male students and 28 female students. All of them have taken the Interpreting course for about 32 hours (16 weeks, 2 hours per week). Among 32 students, 28(87.5%) of them have passed CET-4i (College English Test-Band 4), 21(65.63%) of them have passed CET-6ii (College English Test-Band 6), and only 12(37.5%) of them have passed TEM-4ii.
As the final exam materials for the undergraduate students under study had five different sets of passages (each set has a Uzbek passage and an English passage) to avoid any possibility of plagiarism and repetition, 32 students were divided into 8 groups to draw lots for the selection of set of passages. The sampling method in this study employs a homogeneous sampling strategy, in which the samples share certain experiences that are related to the study. Here groups of students who had the same set of passages by drawing lots were sampled to be objects of the current study. As a pilot study, this study sampled four participants, all of whom are female students. At the time of exam, two of them have passed TEM-4 and CET-6, one of them has passed CET-6, and one of them has passed CET-4 only. That means 50% of their English level is good, 25% of their English is of intermediate level, and 25% of them is poor in English.