Characteristics Of Thematic Structure In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Halliday proposed the notion of theme and rheme in his Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)theory.Studies demonstrate that theme and rheme analysis can also apply to Chinese,though it is an entirely different language compared to English.Due to the differences in sentence structure and ways of expression remaining between Chinese and English,the thematic structures in Chinese differ from those in English accordingly.Moreover,the interpreter’s choice of theme will determine where to start the sentence and how to build up the text.Compared with simultaneous interpreting,consecutive interpreting provides interpreters with more opportunities to choose the theme of each clause and to decide how the passage unfolds.Therefore,having a better grasp of the thematic structure of the source text can help the interpreter select the theme strategically,understand the logic of the source language,and improve the quality of the language output.This research takes the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting of the Premier’s press conference on the Two Sessions from 2016 to 2020 as a research object.It analyzes the characteristics,changing patterns,and possible reasons for changes in the thematic structure in the Chinese source text and English target text,and gives suggestions for interpreting strategies.This research is based on the theme and rheme theory by Halliday(2000),the thematic progression theory(Danes,1972;Huang,1985;Hu,1994;Zhu,2001),as well as the thematic structure theory in Chinese(Fang,1989).The research adopts qualitative and quantitative method:the former is used to find out the characteristics and changing patterns of the Chinese source text and English target text,including the frequency of marked and unmarked themes,simple,multiple and clause theme,different types of multiple themes and different types of thematic progression patterns;the latter is used to discuss the possible reasons of the changes of thematic structures and to offer suggestions to interpreting strategies.The research comes to two conclusions:first,the proportion of unmarked themes outnumber that of marked themes in both source and target text,and there are more unmarked themes in target text than that in target text;simple themes account for the largest proportion among all types of themes and is most likely to be preserved in the target text;"textual+topical" theme is the most common combination of multiple theme and textual theme is usually omitted by the interpreter when it has little to do with the meaning of the text;clause theme is least frequently shown in the source text and the interpreter tends to replace clause theme with a simple theme.Second,most TP patterns are preserved by the interpreter on the whole,among which TP with a constant theme and simple linear TP are the most frequently used and preserved.All in all,the changes of the thematic structures and progression patterns are related to the differences in Chinese and English language,the particularity of the working mode of consecutive interpreting,and the features of political discourse.