A Study On The Shift Of Texts’ Position On The Oral-Literate Continuum In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

This article looks at the effect of simultaneous interpreting on the orality and literacy of the target text as compared with that of the source text. The author first established a small corpus for the study:she asked6volunteer student interpreters to interpret two recorded speeches respectively, one speech very oral (spoken-like) and the other very literate (written-like), and she recorded their interpreting and transcribed the source texts and target texts according to the records. Based on related literature, the author identified9features relevant to textual orality or literacy as parameters to evaluate the orality and literacy of the text. The9features can be found both in English and Chinese and can be easily counted. By comparing the parameters in respective source and its target texts, the author found that simultaneous interpreting exerts an equalizing effect on the position of a text on the oral-literate continuum; i.e., it diminishes the orality of markedly oral texts and the literacy of markedly literate ones. At the end of this article, the author tried to use the Effort Model created by Gile to explain this phenomenon.