Explicitation Of Personal Pronouns In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

The explicitation of personal pronouns is a prominent subject of the study of personal pronouns in translation.Previous studies have mainly explored the explicitation of personal pronouns in literary texts.The research on explicitation of personal pronouns in political texts primarily focuses on written translation.Additionally,there are few personal pronoun explicitation studies based on parallel texts and comparable texts.Therefore,this study investigates the explicitation of personal pronouns in consecutive interpreting based on a triangular set-up of the source text,translation text,and comparable text in the target language.The source texts are remarks by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at press conferences held by the National People’s Congress of China in 2017,2018 and 2019,the translation texts are the interpretations of the remarks,and the original English texts are remarks by former U.S.President Donald Trump in press briefings in September 2020.This thesis conducts a thorough analysis from both an inter-lingual and intra-lingual perspective.The former investigates systemic differences between Chinese and English and the personal pronoun explicitation in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting,while the latter compares the different uses of personal pronouns between interpreted English and original English to help improve renderingThis thesis shows that there is evident explicitation of personal pronouns in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting of political texts.To be specific,the inter-lingual contrast indicates that the proportion of third-person pronouns exhibits the most significant increase,followed by first-person pronouns.The intra-lingual contrast suggests that,generally,the frequencies of personal pronouns in interpreted English texts are lower than that of original English texts.Specifically,the frequency of first-person plural pronouns in target texts is higher than in original English texts,while first-person singular pronouns show opposite results.Additionally,the frequency of second-person pronouns is higher in target texts vis-a-vis original English texts.These phenomena can be explained by the following factors:systematic differences between Chinese and English,the interpersonal function of first-person pronouns,the indefinite reference of second-person pronouns and the endophoric functions of third-person pronouns.This thesis explores the difference in the use of personal pronouns in Chinese-English interpreting and aims to shed light on how interpreters can handle personal pronoun translation in political texts.