Cohesion And Coherence In Interpreting

This practice report is centered on the consecutive interpretation provided by the author in a lecture of the China-Africa Legal Professionals Exchange Project.During this lecture,which is themed on “Arbitration in China-Africa Commercial Disputes”,the author interpreted for three hours without notes.After evaluating the performance of the interpretation,the author identified four types of inadequacies,including grammatical mistakes,the lack of background information,unfamiliarity with the accents as well as the lack of coherence and cohesion.Among them,the first three are problems that are widely seen in interpreting and are carefully addressed by interpreters during their daily practices.However,coherence and cohesion,as important standards for translation and writing,have been largely overlooked by interpreters.In fact,audience’s understanding of the interpreted text is heavily relied on whether the text is coherent or cohesive enough.During consecutive interpreting,in order to relieve the workload of the interpreters,the speakers usually pause after several sentences,which will,however,break the perfectly connected texts into a few isolated sentences.Therefore,an interpreter needs to have a macro view and figure out the context in order to achieve coherence and cohesion in the target language.In the meantime,the interpreter has to make sure that he/she can reserve and successfully deliver the inner logic hidden in the source language.Furthermore,the interpreter needs to ensure that his/her output is independent,in other words,the output should make sense in its own right.Therefore,it is never easy to achieve coherence and cohesion in interpreting,but once achieved,the quality of interpretation will be brought up to a whole new level.As a result,the author decided to delve into the topic of coherence and cohesion and have an in-depth case analysis to see what she can do to achieve coherence and cohesion.