A Study On Shifts In English-chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

This research conducts a descriptive study on shifts in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting.To achieve the final purpose of this study,three research questions are presented:(1)What are the types of shifts in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting?(2)What is the distribution of each type of shift in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting?(3)What are the possible causes of shifts in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting?To answer these research questions,the bilingual videos of 92 minutes from the2020 Winter Davos Forum are selected.Based on the objective transcription of the bilingual videos,a corpus of 29065 words is created.Using current definitions and academic standards for the field of interpreting,this study matches the English source language and Chinese target language in sentence-level texts.Based on previous research,the bilingual corpus is annotated in a quantitative form to analyze the data.Based on classifications relevant to shifts in previous studies and analysis of the data,the types of shifts are identified.Based on the annotated corpus,the proportional relationship of each type of shift is calculated.Combined with Effort Model and the literature of previous studies,the reasons for the occurrence of shifts in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting are analyzed.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)Addition,generalization,omission,and misinterpretation are four types of shifts that occur in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting.(2)Omission occurs most frequently in simultaneous interpreting,followed by misinterpretation.Generalization occurs least frequently among the four types of shifts,followed by addition.Omission and misinterpretation are found to account for the highest proportion of shifts,accounting for more than95% of total shifts.(3)Influenced by cognitive resource deficiency and cognitive capability deficiency,the interpreter fails to coordinate efforts well,and shifts from source language may occur to reduce the load and balance the allocation of resource.At the theoretical level,the classification of shifts applied in this study enriches the research on shifts in interpreting.At the practical level,this study is an aid to the practice and teaching of interpreting.At the methodological level,the corpus-based method applied in this study provides a reference value for interpreting studies.