Nexus And Parsing In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting (SI)

SI, as a kind of advanced bilingual activity, is highly complex, or even seemingly mysterious to laymen. Yet it has a handful of basic rules to follow, among which syntactic linearity is the most fundamental one, which demands paring or segmenting of the source language. Thus parsing constitutes one of the most important tactics in SI. Currently there are some theories on parsing both at home and abroad; reading through them, the author finds that no consensus has yet been arrived among theorists on how to do parsing in SI. This dissertation, through analyzing units of parsing in the case study, endeavors to explore rules of parsing in English-Chinese SI. The author first tentatively proposes a hypothesis - there is a correlation between nexuses and units of parsing in English-Chinese SI. Then in light of nexus theory, the hypothesis is testified with an observational study, which is conducted with the transcriptions of the authentic SI for President Bush's 2006 State of Union address as the research material. Finally, through the analysis of the research results, the author arrives at a conclusion that most of the units of parsing in English-Chinese SI are nexuses. This thesis responds to the research questions and explains as many details as possible.