Speech Rate And Word Order Adjustment In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

In English-Chinese consecutive interpreting practices,speech rate affects the quality of interpreting.Since English word order differs from that of Chinese,word order adjustment is a common phenomenon in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.This thesis is based on an empirical study with 10 native-Chinese-speaking student interpreters as subjects.Based on an understanding of previous research,this study starts with Attribute Word,Attribute Phrase,Attributive Clause,Adverbial Word,Adverbial Phrase,Adverbial Clause of Reason and Result,Adverbial Clause of Time and Adverbial Clause of Condition,,and through an interpreting experiment followed by retrospective interviews,investigates the student interpreters’ word order adjustment at normal and higher speech rates in English-Chinese interpreting.The experiment results show that:1)Word order adjustment happens under both normal and high speech rates,but less often at the faster rate compared to the standard rate.2)Speech rate affects word order differently under different circumstances.As for the eight types of adjustments mentioned in this thesis,Adverbial Clause of Reason and Result,Attributive Clause,and Adverbial Clause of Condition tend to be more heavily affected by speech rates due to its stronger associated logicality,whereas Attribute Word and Adverbial Phrase often serve the function of providing supplemental information,and therefore interpreters tend to omit them or interpret without adjustment.3)It has been discovered that the causes affecting the student interpreters’ word order adjustment includes note-taking,listening,comprehension,subjective choice,etc.,with failures to receive properly or to keep up with the speech and missing notes being the most prevalent.The above findings have some significant implications for interpreting training.Therefore,the author suggests that teachers should pay attention to selecting audiovisual materials of different speech rates as well as training student interpreters’ ability to understand the logic of the speech in E-C consecutive interpreting.