Dealing With Prepositional Phrases In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

In English,prepositions with flexible meanings are frequently used.They function as bonding agents in sentences.And sometimes it is difficult to deal with them in simultaneous interpretation,which is a high complex discourse performance with severe time pressure. However,in this regard,a systematic research on prepositions or prepositional phrases has not been carried out.Considering this,this thesis explores the specific techniques to treat prepositional phrases to improve the performance.Based on the Effort Model of Daniel Gile and the principle of syntactic linearity,this thesis summarizes the frequently used techniques through an observational study.It also elaborates on the reasons for the adoption of such techniques as well as the impact on the performance.It is found that twelve techniques employed in interpreting prepositional phrases are conversion,segmentation,conversion into verbs after segmentation,omission,repetition, amplification,combination of "amplification+repetition",substitution,afterthought,negation, adjacency and waiting.In addition,the major findings made in this research are:Firstly,prepositional phrases are usually converted into verbs when they serve predicatives in sentences.Secondly,segmentation before prepositional phrases is the most important technique in simultaneous interpretation in that many other techniques derive from it,such as conversion into verbs after segmentation,omission,repetition,amplification,combination of "amplification+ repetition",substitution,afterthought,negation,adjacency.Thirdly,when prepositional phrases denote the shared knowledge and a general location, they can be omitted,no matter they function as attributes or adverbials in sentences.This is also true to appositive prepositional phrases.Fourthly,such techniques as repetition,amplification,combination of "amplification+ repetition",substitution,afterthought,negation,adjacency and waiting are employed to overcome the word order difference between English and Chinese.And amplification can be specified into qualifier amplification,elaboration amplification,relationship amplification, amplification of nouns or pronouns and co-textual amplification.Fifthly,some of these techniques can be supplementary to one another,among which the combination of "amplification+repetition" is the most widely used one.It can deal with the prepositional phrase appearing at the final position of a sentence. Finally,adjacency is adopted to treat the prepositional phrase modifying several items.These techniques can maintain the word order of the source language to a large degree, which contributes a lot to the smooth and timely rendition.This thesis also sheds some light on simultaneous interpretation teaching and practice.