A Report On The Simulated Simultaneous Interpretation Of Barack Obama’s2013State Of The Union Address

This interpretation report is concerned with the English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation program of the attributive clauses in Barack Obama’s2013State of the Union Address. It targets to improve the author’s practical skills of interpretation.Barack Obama’s2013State of the Union Address is a personal political address with formal language and personal presentation style. In the presentation, Obama used many attributive clauses to give information. However, the attributive clauses are very difficult for simultaneous interpretation. Because of the huge differences in linguistic structures between Chinese and English, it is tough for interpreters to finish interpretation and maintain logic regularity simultaneously. In detail, it is difficult to translate the very long attributive clauses into adjectives. And it is tough for interpreters to translate the attributive clauses located in the middle of the sentence as well as the attributive clauses at the end of the sentence, which costs much time in simultaneous interpretation and may influence the interpretation of the following text.According to Peter Newmark, semantic translation attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allows, the exact contextual meaning of the original (Newmark,1982:41). This report adopts Peter Newmark’s Theory of Semantic Translation to overcome the different structures between two languages and interpret the whole information contained in the original text. It puts forward four methods for attributive clauses interpretation:segmentation once, segmentation twice, syntactic linearity and synthesization. So, the interpreters don’t have to translate the linguistic structure and ensure the following text will be interpreted.This program explores the simultaneous interpretation methods for attributive clauses in Barack Obama’s2013State of the Union Address, pointing out the difficulties and methods of attributive clauses interpretation, which may improve the author’s ability of interpretation and help other interpreters to deal with similar difficulties in the future.