Cohesion And Coherence In The Consecutive Interpretation From Chinese To English On Press Conference

As China assumes an increasingly important role in international affairs and global economy, consecutive interpretation is widely used in lectures, political talks, business meetings and press conferences. In consecutive interpretation, the interpreter listens to the original speech and at the same time, he tries to memorize and interpret the original speech with the help of his understanding of the topic and notes taken down. After the speaker finishes a part or the whole of his speech, the interpreter quickly expresses the meaning of the speech to the audience in the target language. Since the consecutive interpreter can start interpreting after the speaker finishes his speech or clarifies his viewpoint, the interpreter already understands the main point of the speaker before putting the original speech into the target language. Compared with the simultaneous interpreter, the consecutive interpreter is given more time to polish his interpretation and make it more idiomatic and expressive in the target language.As one important criterion of assessing the quality of interpretation, coherence requires that a text should be semantically connected, integrated, and expresses relations of closeness. Cohesive ties contribute to the coherence of a text. There are differences of cohesive devices between Chinese and English; therefore, those cohesive devices must be shifted when the original text is interpreted from Chinese to English. As little attention has been paid to the feature of cohesion in the product of consecutive interpreters, the author of the thesis wants to investigate characteristics of the pattern for shifts of cohesive devices in consecutive interpretation from Chinese to English and factors contributing to the formation of such a pattern.The theoretical framework is based on the translation theory of the interpretive school and differences in cohesive devices between Chinese and English. Five specific research questions for the present study are elicited. The author conducted an in-depth observation of a corpus consisting of consecutive interpretation by successful interpreters for press conferences held subsequently to the Third Session of the Tenth National People's Congress in 2005, to the Fourth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress in 2006, and to the Fifth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress in 2007. It is found that shifts of cohesive devices in consecutive interpretation from Chinese to English take mainly the forms of reproduction, addition, omission and substitution, with the predominance of reproduction and addition. The pattern for shifts in cohesive devices shows a tendency from implicit cohesion to explicit cohesion and linguistic differences between Chinese and English are identified as a key factor contributing to the formation of such a pattern.