The Problems Awaiting an Interpreter in the Process of Consecutive Interpreting from Persian into English: A Case Study

This paper is mainly intended to explore the two practices of interpreting and translating so as to spot any possible differences between them. It should be noted, however, that the focal point of the present study is interpreting and consecutive interpreting in particular which seems to create a good many problems for novice interpreters as well as interpreting trainees. To achieve the objective, 46 M.A. students of translation participated in three different tests administered in the form of TOEFL, interview, and interpreting. These tests were meant to exhibit the participants` language proficiency, their performance as interpreters, and above all the types of problems awaiting each one of them while interpreting. The results indicated that the top three main problem areas for interpreters as arranged hierarchically according to the range of frequency are the choice of lexicon, syntax and semantics respectively. It was also observed that syntactic and semantic problems arose from inappropriate choice of lexicon in seven areas of noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and pronoun on the basis of the frequency of their occurrence.