A Study On Chinese Verb Interpreting Based On Students’ Class Interpreting

This thesis aims at researching the Chinese verbs in Chinese-English interpreting.Verbs, huge in number and frequent in use, are the most active and complex part of speech in the Chinese language. They play a decisive role and predominate over other elements because the formation of the overwhelming majority of Chinese sentences is dependent upon verbs. However, due to the diversity of Chinese verbs, they can cause great difficulties to Chinese-English interpreting. Hence, the handling of Chinese verbs, to a large extent, determines the successful performance of an interpreter in Chinese-English interpreting, and dealing with Chinese verbs tactically can make the English interpretations more idiomatic and acceptable to the English language users.Under the guidance of the Interpretive Theory and the concepts of hypotaxis and parataxis, this thesis proposes three basic strategies — conversion, omission and amplification in coping with the interpreting of Chinese verbs. With a view to assessing the students’ability and awareness in the proper handling of Chinese verbs, a test based on 25 Chinese sentences used for Chinese-English consecutive interpreting by 40 English majors has been conducted, followed by a statistical analysis. It has also elaborated on the reasons for student interpreters’ low rate of restructuring Chinese verbs into other forms in English.The major findings in this research are summarized as follows:1. The Interpretive Theory, which has conventionally been applied to address translation problems above sentence level, and hypotaxis & parataxis, often discussed in translation, are theoretically feasible to be employed in the study of Chinese verb interpreting.2. Most of the student interpreters just simply turn Chinese verbs into English ones and possess little consciousness of resorting to different methods in interpreting Chinese verbs, which calls for the relevant training to increase their awareness and enhance their ability.3. The difficulties in interpreting Chinese verbs originate from the differences between Chinese and English, particularly the ones between verbs in terms of tense and aspect, transitivity, zero-verb phenomenon in Chinese, and failure in lexical equivalence.4. A proper use of strategies can facilitate the interpreting process, improve the quality of interpretations, and achieve the communicative effect.This thesis is a tentative study regarding Chinese verb interpreting, which is of great practical value and can shed some light on the interpreting practice and teaching.