Student Interpreters’ Conscious Omissions In English-chinese And Chinese-english Consecutive Interpreting

Omission is a common phenomenon in interpreting and language direction could havean impact on interpreter’s performance. This thesis is an empirical study involvingfourteen student interpreters with Chinese and English as their A and B languagesrespectively. Through two interpreting tasks and subsequent stimulated retrospectiveinterview, with quantitative and qualitative analysis both adopted, the study comparesstudent interpreters’ conscious omissions in English-Chinese and Chinese-Englishconsecutive interpreting.The study adopts Kintsch’s theory of propositional analysis which was furthercodified by Turner and Greene as the basic tool for text analysis. The propositions ofboth English and Chinese source speeches are firstly listed out and then comparedwith the interpreters’ output to identify their propositional omissions. Napier’sclassification of omissions together with the stimulated retrospective interviews isused to find out conscious omission, its proportion and distribution in the twolanguage directions. The causes for conscious omissions in the two languagedirections are analyzed.Experiment results show that,1) all student interpreters make more omissions inE-C than in C-E, and thirteen out of fourteen subjects make more conscious omissionsin their E-C interpreting;2) conscious unintentional omissions are more outstandingamong subjects in C-E, while in E-C it is conscious intentional and consciousunintentional;3) double times of conscious strategic omissions are observed in C-Ethan in E-C;4) for conscious intentional omissions, all subjects make such omissionsmainly due to comprehension challenge in E-C, while in C-E eight of the subjectsmake such omissions mainly due to expression failure in English.It is found that:1) note-related factors turn out to be a major contributor to influencing student interpreters’ conscious omissions in both directions;2）figures arestill an influencing factor for conscious omissions in both language directions in thatstudent interpreters tend to leave out other information around that figure;3) while Blanguage comprehension remains a trigger for conscious omissions in E-C, Blanguage reproduction doesn’t seem to have great impact on student interpreter’sconscious omissions in C-E at the postgraduate stage;4) results testify to Gile’sEfforts Model for CI and its two operational hypothesis—“tightrope hypothesis” and“competition hypothesis”, and student interpreters seem to be working closer to theircapacity saturation in E-C interpreting. The experiment happens to provide a casestudy concerning Gile’s2005paper about interpreting directionality by showing thatB language comprehension requires more processing capacity than B languagereproduction. These are expected to promote further understanding of omission anddirectionality.