A Contrastive Study On The Quality Of E-C Simultaneous Interpreting With And Without Text

Simultaneous interpreters are playing an indispensable role in international conferences, and the study on simultaneous interpreting (SI) is also gaining momentum and becoming more diversified. The author chooses to study the text in SI that is provided to the interpreters with no sufficient time for preparation. The Effort Model is introduced as the theoretical framework of the thesis and helps to analyze the positive and negative impacts of text on SI quality. An empirical study is conducted to compare the quality between SI with and without text from the perspectives of fidelity and language and delivery, and the reasons lying behind the differences are also explored. The results of the experiment are in line with the theoretical analysis:the overall performance in SI with text is better than that in SI without text. The same goes for fidelity, but interpreters tend to omit big chunks of information when lagging far behind the speaker in SI with text while the information loss in SI without text is confined to details. The language and delivery in SI without text is more fluent and natural by contrast.The thesis is made up of six chapters. The first chapter is an introduction of the definition and classification of SI, as well as the purpose, methodology and significance of the study. The second chapter contains two parts of literature reviews. One is a review of studies on SI with and without text both home and abroad and the other is on interpreting quality evaluation. The assessment chart of English Interpreting Certificate is introduced and proves suitable for the quality evaluation in the empirical study through explanation and argumentation. In the third chapter, the Effort Model proposed by Gile is demonstrated and the respective models in SI with and without text are analyzed. On basis of the model, the impacts that the text brings to SI quality are deduced from the positive and negative angles. The fourth chapter serves as description of the empirical study with elaborate explanation on elements such as the experiment design, assessment and selection of the materials. The aim is to collect data to study the impacts of the text on SI quality. The fifth chapter represents experiment data in the form of histograms to demonstrate the comparison of SI with text and without text respectively in regards of the total score, fidelity and language and delivery. Then the author probes into the reasons behind the differences based on the effort model and suggestions for SI training and SI practitioners are offered. The sixth chapter contains conclusions about the findings and limitations of the thesis.