Treatment Of Long Sentences In E-C Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is widely used in international conferences, businessactivities and press conferences. It is a highly complex interlingual activity which requiresthe interpreter to coordinate between listening, comprehension, memorization andproduction all at the same time. One very common difficulty in E-C simultaneousinterpreting is how to interpret those long sentences which often appear in English texts.This report tries to analyze this problem using the case of Joseph Biden’s speech inSichuan University. Through a simultaneous interpreting practice of this case and somefollow-up studies, this thesis comes to the conclusion that to effectively deal with thoselong sentences in E-C simultaneous interpreting, two steps may be taken. Step1:segmentation of the long sentence into smaller, more manageable sense groups(segmenting the long sentence at subordinating conjunctions/prepositions/infinitives/participles ect.); step2: linking the segmented sense groups up smoothly into awell-structured, easily understood target-language sentence through adding logicalconnectors, repetition or conversion of speech. It is hoped that these findings will behelpful to other interpreters faced with similar problems.