| In recent years,Simultaneous Interpreting(SI)as a profession is gaining momentum in China,but being an emerging profession and having no sound professional qualification and quality control system in place make interpreting quality very uncertain.The research on professional interpreters' performance is thus highly relevant.However,very little has been done on that in China.SI is a process and a product by which speakers' messages are conveyed to the audience to facilitate communication.Information should be at the core of SI quality assessment,but assessment approaches available remain basically lexico-semantic.Adopting a semantic-pragmatic approach,the research established an information-based SI assessment system,assessed information loss in spontaneous speech interpreting by professional English-Chinese(E-C)simultaneous interpreters in business and academic conferences,and explained why and how information loss occurred in E-C SI.The research consists of three parts.Part I established the information-based SI assessment system based on a cross-fertilization between SI working mechanism and Lambrecht's(1994)Information Structure Theory following a review of research findings on information,discourse and information,and information structure.The assessment system consists of a metric scheme for information in source language,making assertion the unit of measurement,defining and categorizing assertions,and an assessment scheme for information loss in SI output.Part II is a descriptive study.Based on 17 recording clips of 17 professional interpreters working at 17 international conferences,a parallel corpus of E-C SI was constructed and a corpus-based study was followed to delineate information loss.High frequency and wide distribution of various information-loss types were observed,many of which belong to propositional information loss or loss of focal elements of information,indicating the prominence of information loss in SI.Information loss occurred in about 50%of the T Assertions with 25%subject to propositional information loss and 20%loss of focal elements of information.Overall information-loss rate was around 25%-50%.Over 40%of T Assertions in 3 clips,over 30%in 5 and over 20%in 11 suffered propositional information loss.Over 30%of T Assertions in 2 clips and over 20%in 8 suffered loss of focal elements of information.Part III is an interpretive study.Corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis as well as retrospective interviews of three interpreters,through the lens of an analytical framework combining the Effort Model of SI,language comprehension and production theories in psycholinguistics and the Relevance Theory in cognitive pragmatics,revealed that SI operational constraints(concurrent listening and speaking,time constraint,incremental processing),source language variables(delivery rate,information density,accent,linguistic complexity,technicality)and interpreting direction(B to A)were major causes of information loss.Factors such as concurrent listening and speaking,time constraint,delivery rate and information density tend to incur in interpreters cognitive resource deficiency while factors such as incremental processing,B-to-A interpreting,accent and linguistic complexity tend to incur cognitive capability deficiency.These factors,working alone or with others,gave rise to 3 information-loss conditions:a resource-deficiency type,a capability-deficiency type or a mixed-type reflected in 12 scenarios leading to either strategic or problematic information loss unfolded as 13 information-loss types.Given the lack of professional conference interpreter' SI corpus constructed and researched by professional interpreters in China,the research is expected to fill a gap and break some new ground in the SI product and process research.Besides it may offer strong implications for SI professionalization in China helping the country better meet its international communication needs.It could also shed some light on the SI pedagogy. |
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