An Integrated Approach To Syntactic Processing In Interpreting

During interpreting,interpreters take the source language(SL)message and encode it as faithfully as possible in the target language(TL).In some cases,they do this as they listen to the SL message unfold(simultaneous interpreting,SI);in other cases,they first listen to the SL message,and then subsequently re-express it in TL(consecutive interpreting,CI).Understanding how people map from an utterance in one language to an utterance expressing the same meaning in another language can inform models of bilingual language production.But the processes underlying these two forms of interpreting are not well understood.The present dissertation reported a series of studies investigating the different syntactic processing mechanism during CI and SI via converging evidences from datadriven studies and behavioral experiments.The two data-driven studies investigated how Chinese professional interpreters produce sentences during real-world CI and SI tasks via computational linguistic indices dependency distance and frequency motif via corpus and treebank of English interpreting output.The results showed that the linguistic features regarding syntax were significantly correlated between source input and target output in SI only.Thus,it was proposed that people tend to reduce the syntactic processing load by further segmentation in SI,and by reconstruction and simplification during CI.In addition,three experiments were conducted where interpreters-in-training listened to SL sentences in Mandarin Chinese and interpreted them into English.We investigated whether people repeated SL syntax to different extents during CI and SI,and whether the likelihood to repeat SL structure was affected by SL and TL syntactic complexity during CI and SI differently.The results suggested that during interpreting,people regenerated syntax based on the concept they retrieved from the SL utterance,with a tendency to repeat SL syntax due to cross-linguistic syntactic priming.But structural priming decayed over time,with more priming when source and target were adjacent(SI)and less when they were separated by intervening information(CI).Moreover,both SL and TL syntactic complexity affected syntactic repetition during CI only.It is thus concluded that the syntactic processing during interpreting are subject to time constraint and types of cognitive load.