The Study On Information Structure Of Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

The fundamental function of language is to convey information.And the process of language exchange is actually the process that given information and new information alternates.From the perspective of functional grammar,Information Structure is one of the means to achieve textual meaning.It divides the information in the communication process into given information and new information from the perspective of listeners.The arrangement of information within a sentence is always subject to the needs of communication.The top priority of interpreting is to convey the messages accurately and timely.Therefore,it is of great significance for interpreters to understand the distribution of given and new information and the ways of information flow in the source language and the target language.This research is a case study of the interpreting transcript of Premier Li Keqiang’s press conference in 2018 after two sessions.Based on the Information Structure theory enriched by Halliday and other linguistics,this thesis studied the distribution of given and new information and the ways of information flow in the source language and the target language,and interpreting strategies adopted by the interpreter in controlling the information flow.This thesis adopted the quantitative analysis,qualitative analysis and the method of text analysis.First,the author analyzed the distribution of given information and new information and percentage of them allocated on themes and rhemes.The author found that there are more no-theme clauses in Chinese.In the clauses with themes,both Premier and the interpreter tend to use given information and subject as theme;Every clause in the two languages has rheme,and the percentage of new information used as rheme is quite high,because the communicative activities depends on the transmission of new information.After that,the author analyzed the ways of information flow of the two languages,the interpreting strategies adopted in arranging information and the effects brought by such selection.The findings are as follows: First,the interpreter usually adopted given information as theme to make the discourse coherent and put new information as rheme so that listeners can easily grasp the main meaning of the speaker;Second,while interpreting government’s actions or measures,the interpreter usually adopted “actors” as theme and putting government measures as rheme to “speak topically”,thus further ensuring discourse coherence;Third,interpreter used the new information relevant to the discourse topic as theme to make the key information more salient,and further achieve certain communicative effects and more accurately express the speaker’s meaning.Besides,the author found that when interpreting idioms,the interpreter changed the degree of the theme’s markedness for several times.Since the listeners had lower expectations on the information carried by theme than Chinese native speakers,the markedness of it would be stronger for listeners,which made the listeners spend more cognitive costs to understand the information.It is not conducive to the information flow.The author thinks that in this case,the interpreter should fully consider the topical framework and the markedness of the information carried by themes and strive to produce more easy-understood interpretation.