Coherence In Over-the-phone Interpreting: A Tentative Study

The purpose of this thesis is to explore over-the-phone interpreting (OPI), the newly emerging form of interpretation, from the perspective of coherence. For that purpose, the author first reviews the history of over-the-phone interpreting and gives readers a general understanding of this form of interpretation by introducing the process as well as its advantages and disadvantages. Then, with reference to coherence theories in discourse analysis and translation studies, a coherence assessment model in over-the-phone interpreting is put forward. In the model, the connectedness of interpretation production is measured from four aspects, namely, semantic coherence, syntactic coherence, stylistic coherence and pragmatic coherence.To put the assessment model into test and discover how interpreters perform under the settings of OPI in terms of coherence, an emprical study was carried out to simulate the process of over-the-phone interpreting. The conversations between subjects were recorded and analysed, the result of which leads the author to believe that interpreters are still not competent enough to maintain the consistency of their presentation and the model has covered almost all the incoherences that appear in the experiment. In addition, three suggestions are given to the over-the-phone interpreters for the improvement of their performance in terms of coherence.This study fills the gap of research in over-the-phone interpreting by working out how coherence can be applied and how it contributes to the improvement of the service effect. The coherence assessment model established in this thesis has important implications for interpreters in that it can help access their work and thus make progress.