An Empirical Investigation Into The Difficulties In Consecutive Interpretation Of The Chinese Officialese

With the increase of her national strength and the consolidation of international status, China has attracted more attention from the international community. More and more news conferences are held to publicize the news in China, putting more pressure and responsibility on interpreters'shoulders. This study investigates the possible difficulties encountered by the interpreters in interpreting Chinese officialese and the possible causal factors of these difficulties.Eight second-year postgraduate students majoring in English with interpretation as their research focus took part in this empirical study, interpreting four passages of Chinese officialese with distinct features. Data are collected including the video and audio recording of their interpreting, the stimulated recall, the interview and the notes. Within the framework of Liu Minhua's CI process model and based on the related theories of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, the data are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The major findings are as follows:(1) The features of Chinese officialese, such as four-character structure, long attributes, null-subject sentence and long-dependency sentence, as well as high information density caused by these features, adversely influence the interpreting process in all stages.(2) Hindered by Chinese wordings and sentence structures, the students are unable to deverbalize the original text. The most remarkable difficulties are in the interpreting stage.(3) The possible causal factors of these difficulties include complex Chinese sentence structure, parataxis and high information density, while the English proficiency of student interpreters and their note-taking skills also play major roles in their performances.Therefore, the interpreting course should intensify the training of Chinese officialese interpreting while the students should further improve their English proficiency and note-taking skills. A course of contrastive study on Chinese and English is suggested to enhance the students'understanding of the language differences.