Redundancy In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpretation From The Perspective Of Information Theory

Since China joined WTO, China has built up frequent communications and closecooperation with many countries. China has attracted the attention of the whole world as afast developing country. In order to exchange with other countries, Chinese-Englishsimultaneous interpretation, as an effective information means is accepted by most domains.With the background of global economic integration, English as an international language isused worldly wide; Chinese is almost spoken by one third population of the whole world.Following the advance of international status, so many international conferences have beenheld in China, Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation plays an important role incross-cultural communication. It promotes China to face to the world. From the perspective ofInformation Theory, the author in this thesis tries to discuss what a simultaneous interpretershould do to analyze and deal with redundant information, to decrease the communicationload and make the output language comply with the audience’s channel capacity in the limitedtime, in order to reduce the noise effectively in the information transmission process andensure the smooth communication between the speaker and the audience.Redundancy is a core concept of the information theory, which is firstly proposed byClaude E. Shannon, an American mathematician and communication engineer. It indicatesextra information released purposely by the source to withstand“noises”--- many factors thatmay obstruct the transmission of information. Information theory initially applied to the fieldof communication, however, gradually acquired wider application outside the field of hardscience. Eugene A. Nida, as an American translation theorist, firstly applied this theory intotranslation and practice. Linguists have proved that redundancy is a common phenomenon in language. It exists both in language systems and people’s communication through language.Simultaneous interpretation as a way of communication also exists redundancy.Simultaneous Interpretation is a way of interpretation that the interpreter conveys thespeech content to the audience continuously without disturbing the speaker. Its biggestadvantage is high efficiency. It makes sure that the speaker has a speech coherently, and willnot influence and interrupt the speaker’s thinking, so as to the audience can understand thespeech content clearly. Simultaneous Interpretation is regarded as the most effective mode ofinterpreting, and in the international conference it can be considered as the most basic way ofinterpreting. It has more academic and professional. Therefore, it requires that the interpretercan finish the source language’s predict, understand, remember and convert with the help ofthe given topic knowledge in the limited lime when he or she was listening the speech, whilethe interpreter should listen into, organize, modify and express for target language, and thenspeak in target language. The process of simultaneous interpretation involves the speaker, theinterpreter, and the audience, among which the interpreter intends to convey more and clearerinformation to the audience, unavoidably, the redundant information is frequently carried intotheir interpretation. In simultaneous interpretation, the source language message with highdegree of redundancy will decrease the efficiency of communication. Meanwhile, the sourcelanguage message with a low degree of redundancy will challenge the audience’s channelcapacity. Therefore, how to deal with the redundant information in the source language canembody the interpreter’s professional level.In this paper, the author refers to the redundancy and some related basic concepts inInformation Theory, and then discusses the important functions in Chinese-Englishsimultaneous interpretation and the characteristics of Chinese and English. The redundancy ofChinese-English simultaneous interpretation can be classified into four aspects: phonemicredundancy, syntactic redundancy, semantic redundancy and cultural redundancy. The authoradopts the big conference practice discourse, and then elaborates the specific principles todeal with the redundant information. So, three basic techniques are proposed by the author,namely omission, preservation and amplification. From the macroscopic view, the author alsoemphasizes that Nida’s dynamic equivalence translation principle applies to simultaneousinterpretation. Chinese and English, as two different language systems, have distinctdifferences at the syntactic and semantic levels. Moreover, in the process of Chinese-Englishsimultaneous interpretation, the interpreter should delete or add some relative background andcultural information according to the situational context. Therefore, the interpreter shouldcombine the three techniques effectively and use them flexibly.