Cohesion Shifts In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

The concern with study of consecutive interpreting (CI ) can have far-reaching implications for the theory as well as pedagogy of interpreting. As a young sub-discipline within translation study, interpretation study is closely intertwined with the theories constructed in translation study. Research on the interpreter's product and performance therefore will inevitably draw upon the method and results in the related field of translation. The purpose of the present paper is to provide a tentative description of cohesion shifts in Chinese- English ( Ch-En) consecutive interpreting. And the findings are expected to provide specific evidence for shift study in interpretation and translation as a whole. Further, the awareness of such shifts would help interpreters better control their work, thus enhancing their interpreting skills in Ch-En interpretation.Cohesive markers could be served as directives to facilitate and control the process of comprehension in translation as well as interpretation, and therefore it appears to provide an appropriate framework for the description of shifts in translated texts. Research on explicitation has reflected a privileged interest in cohesion shifts. Many Chinese theorists have also supported the tendency of explicitation in Ch-En translation. They claim that most of the disparity could be explained by the fact that English is a pro-formed language while as Chinese is a language linked by senses. Based on the existing findings in psycholinguistics and textual-linguistics, the current study reveals the degree of explicitation resulted from interpreting-related factors.This study focuses heavily on searching the shifts of grammatical cohesion by the combined use of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the former method involves segmenting the twenty source and target texts in the parallel corpus and provides a detailed picture of the general tendency as well as the degree of explicitation. While the later method includes an in-depth analysis of some examples extracted from the corpus , with an aim to explore the reasons behind the findings of the former one. The study explained the shifts of cohesion in three aspects, namely, inter-lingual difference, interpreters'cognitive constraints as well as their needs to keep with the norms of CI.The current study may provide a useful basis for a future search of answers to a series of relevant questions. However, as it is limited to addressing some general issues on cohesion shifts, it clearly would raise more questions than it has answered. Thus, the author would like to see a bigger scale of the study which may be concerned with other language combinations.