A Corpus-Based Study of Trainee Interpreters’ Reflection Journals

This study is a corpus-based analysis of trainee interpreters’ reflective journals. It aims to systematically explore some thematic issues related to interpreting students’ concerns and difficulties encountered in their learning process, as well as the positioning of relevant roles involved in this process as perceived by trainee interpreters. Recognizing the importance of reflective journals in interpreting training, this empirical study compiles a corpus of reflective journals based on a group of students taking interpreting courses at a British university. The analysis focuses on the general ideational themes that emerge from the word frequency list in the corpus, and the specific lexical search on the agents involved in the students’ reflective narratives. The findings of corpus analysis are then triangulated with the interpreter assessment criteria and the curriculum design of the students’ interpreting classes to better contextualize the results. This paper argues that while thematic and content analyses of reflective journals allow some important issues arising from reflective journals to be identified, a corpus-based approach can complement such studies and shed more light on underlying assumptions embedded in students’ reflective narratives, through revealing consistent patterns of selected linguistic features across a large quantity of data which is not be possible in manual analysis.