Effects Of Redundancy On Student Interpreters’Simultaneous Interpretation And Its Coping Tactics

This thesis explores, through theoretical and empirical studies, the effects of Redundancy on student interpreters’Chinese-English (C-E) simultaneous interpretation, the adoption of coping tactics by student interpreters and the efficiency of those tactics.This paper starts with the definition and classification of redundancy within the framework of information theory and Daniel Gile’s Effort Model and Minimum Fidelity Principle to demonstrate that reducing redundancy in simultaneous interpretation is both necessary and justifiable for interpreters to reduce the pressure, improve their performance and ensure the integrity of message delivered. Then the paper reviews previous researches on redundancy in interpretation studies, and points out that previous researches tend to focus on professional interpreters, and few of student interpreters whose information processing capacity are weaker than professional interpreters have been included in those researches.Thence, an empirical study is designed to examine the effects of redundancy on student interpreters. The experimental material, abundant in redundant information, is divided into six paragraphs and then categorized into two groups according to the density of redundancy. Criteria for performance evaluation are established, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis are conducted. The quantitative analysis studies the correlation between the performance of student interpreters and redundancy, between the performance and the number of all coping tactics adopted, and between the performance and the number of particular coping tactics adopted. The qualitative analysis studies efficiencies of relevant coping tactics.Findings of the study demonstrate that redundancy has negative effect on student interpreters’interpretation. Using coping tactics could effectively reduce the amount of information processed by interpreters and thus help them focus on major information and have better performance. Among relevant coping tactics, omission and generalization are most frequently used, and generalization and amplification are most efficient.