A Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting By Interpreting Trainees,Professional Interpreters And Google Translate

As an oral translation activity,interpretation aims to convey the speaker’s message to an audience who may not understand the source language.The interpreter must ensure that the output meets the standards of translated text,which requires proper grammar,coherence,and the use of cohesive devices for smooth sentence connections.In consecutive interpreting,it is crucial to handle cohesive devices effectively to improve interpretation quality.Despite recent discussions on cohesion,there is a lack of comparative studies on how cohesive devices are shifted during consecutive interpreting,particularly among professional interpreters,interpreting trainees and AI products.From this perspective,this study aims to compare and analyze the use and shifts of cohesive devices in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting among professional interpreters,interpreting trainees,and Google Translate.Two professional interpreters and eight MTI students from Beijing Foreign Studies University are invited to interpret a speech from Chinese into English,while the application Google Translate is used to generate an AI interpretation.This research adopts the model of cohesion from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics(Halliday&Hassan,1976;Halliday&Matthiessen,2004).With a focus on references and conjunctions,this paper provides a detailed comparative analysis of the use and shifts of cohesive devices in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting among the three groups.The study found no significant differences in the use and shifts of references and conjunctions among professional interpreters,interpreting trainees,and Google Translate.In all three interpretations,the distribution of various types of references and conjunctions is similar,and the proportion of retained references and conjunctions in the source text remain the highest.However,there are still some differences.Whether it is reference or conjunction,professional interpreters show the highest frequency of omitting,changing,and adding cohesive devices while Google Translate displays the highest frequency of retaining original cohesive devices,with interpreting trainees falling somewhere in between.This reflects the ability and preference of the three groups of participants to flexibly shift cohesive devices during the process of Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.