The Contrastive Study On Cohesion Devices In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting By AI And Human

Since the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed,there has been growing economic and cultural exchanges between China and the strategically cooperative countries,leading to an urgent need for foreign language talents.Therefore,how to provide high-level interpreting has been a hot-spot issue.In 2018,artificial intelligence(AI)has gained popularity since it firstly provides interpreting service for Boao Forum,attracting great attention around the world.Some experts point out that AI will compete with human beings or even take the place.Compared with traditional machine interpreting,it turns out that AI interpreting technology has made great progress in interpreting terminology,phrases and short sentences,yet the logic and cohesion between sentences still need to be improved.Halliday and other linguists point out that cohesion is an important element of discourse analysis,realized by means of five cohesive devices: reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.Based on the Cohesion Theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan,the paper compares and analyzes the cohesive devices in the source texts and C-E consecutive interpretation produced by four AI interpreting applications(Xunfei,Baidu,Tencent and Google)and interpreters.Against the background of Belt and Road Initiative,the interpreting materials are the speeches related with economy and business.The article obtains the number of these five cohesive devices in these discourses by means of copora tool AntConc 3.4.4w and manual counting and lists some typical examples to interpret the data.The results show that interpreters could represent cohesion of the speeches flexibly,espec ially in substitution and lexical cohesion,while AI is often confined to literal interpreting of cohesion.Due to the pressure of time and memory,AI has an advantage over interpreters in information integrity and huge vocabulary memory.The data show that although AI technology has made break-through progress in interpreting by simulating the human brains to a large degree,AI technology is more likely to assist human in interpreting cohesive devices in the future.