A New Use for Error Analysis: the Assessment of the Linguistic Skills of Trainee Interpreters Working into a B Language – A Case Study Focusing on English Article Use

The goal of my study is to show that error analysis can be considered as an invaluable tool to help interpreting trainers detect the linguistic problems their trainees still have to tackle and help the trainees solve those problems. This argument is demonstrated by means of a case study that involved seven Russian-native interpreting trainees who were asked to interpret a text into English simultaneously. The study focused on a specific linguistic class of items, i.e. the English article system. Error analysis was applied to the performances of the subjects of the study, to show that they actually encounter problems in the production of English articles, and that error analysis can help the interpreting trainer detect the article categories his or her trainees need to work on. The dissertation begins with a review of the existing literature on interpreting studies (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 focuses on second language acquisition, and includes issues such as native language interference as well as a brief description of the few existing research studies that combine interpreting studies with second language acquisition. Chapter 4 includes a definition of error analysis and an overview on the studies of interpreting that have applied error analysis to the performance of interpreters. Chapter 5 deals with the linguistic category of definiteness and the differences between English and Russian in terms of the expression of definiteness, which serves as a framework for the case study of the following chapter. The main difficulties Russian native speakers encounter when producing the English articles are also discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6 a case study on the problems with articles Russian native speakers encounter when interpreting simultaneously into English is presented. Finally, in Chapter 7, the conclusions of the study are drawn and proposals for further studies are formulated.