The Study Of Explicitation Motivations In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Translation Norms

Norms, as social and psychological entities, perform directive and regulatory function in people’s social interaction and facilitate the success of every socialization act. Translation, as a mode of social interaction, has its own norms and translators who perform the task of translation are subjected to the directive and regulatory power of such norms. During the past three decades, the theory of translation norms has been consistently developed and studies applying translation norms to explaining translators’decision-making and behaviors in the process of translation have yielded fruitful results. However, interpreting, as an oral mode of translation, has not yet been fully studied under the theoretical framework of translation norms.The author of this paper attempts to test whether translation norms also assume such a directive and regulatory role in guiding interpreters to make decisions about what and how to interpret when they do Chinese-English interpreting. To confirm this hypothesis, the author focuses on the phenomenon of explicitation in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting and tries to see whether the motivations behind the explicitation shifts can be explained by translation norms.The whole research is basically conducted in a three-step way, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. First, a tentative experiment is conducted as an open coding procedure to collect the concepts of explicitation shifts; second, a selective coding is carried out in the revised experiment to confirm and complement the list of motivation concepts and then, to group all concepts into different themes, on which a framework of the explicitation motivations in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting is constructed; third, an analysis of the framework from the perspective of translation norms is performed to test the hypothesis of this current research. The explanatory power of translation norms over the framework confirms the hypothesis i.e., to a certain extent, translation norms direct the interpreters’ decision-making of employing interpreting strategies, regulating and guiding their interpreting behaviors.