Study On Relations Between Chinese Syntactic Features And C-E Simultaneous Interpreters’ EVS

An important source of difficulty in simultaneous interpreting(SI)process is the systemic syntactic differences between source language(hereinafter "SL")and target language(hereinafter"TL").The intense pressure of SI makes interpreters more sensitive and vulnerable to syntactic discrepancies regardless of their second language capacity.Trainee interpreters are more vulnerable to syntactic features of the source language("SL")in simultaneous interpreting("SI")for their simple coping strategies.This thesis explores how the syntactic features in ST affect the trainee interpreters’ EVS length in Chinese to English SI.Syntactic features consist of three parameters:the word order,the subject type,and the syntactic structures unique to Chinese.Systemic functional grammar’s Cardiff model is adapted and employed in the thesis to annotate syntactic features of the source text.An experiment was carried out to examine relations between syntactic features of ST and student interpreters’ EVS length.Subjects in this experiment are all interpreting majors at a Chinese language university.The average EVS length measured in this thesis is 5.321 seconds,longer than the 2 to 4 seconds in literature.The thesis also concludes that EVS length is affected by the subject type of ST,word order of ST,but not syntactic structures specific to Chinese.The thesis also concludes and innovates methods for EVS measurement,expecting to provide some insights to EVS-related SI research in the future.