Linguistic Discrepancy In Branching Preference And Information Restructuring In E-C Consecutive Interpreting

With the improvement of China’s comprehensive national strength, internationalexchanges in politics, economy, culture and other aspects increase with each passing day.As a linguistic intermediary of intercultural communications, interpreting enjoys increasingimportance. Consecutive Interpreting (CI), as an essential category of interpreting, plays asignificant role in international communication. As an extemporaneous communicativeactivity, CI requires interpreters to handle information comprehension and output inextremely short time. In this process, interpreters would be under greater pressure, ifmeeting with complex sentences of coordination and subordination. The attributive clauseand adverbial clause are two types of the most frequently used complex sentences.However, due to the difference of the branching preference of English and Chineselanguages, the processing of attributive and adverbial clauses becomes quite difficult inE-C CI. Exemplifying the E-C interpretation of the Speeches by Oprah Winfrey atHarvard’s and Stanford’s Commencements, this thesis discusses structural rearrangementsin E-C CI in accordance with different branching preferences of English and Chineselanguages. The branching preferences of English and Chinese languages are of greatdifference since these two languages belong to different language systems. Englishlanguage tends to be right-branched, while Chinese language left-branched. Therefore,interpreters should bear this in mind, and make necessary and appropriate structural rearrangements in E-C CI.