An Experiment On Treating Noun Phrases With Multiple Pre-attributives In Chinese-english Simultaneous Interpreting

As we all know, English belongs to Indo-European language while Chinese is abranch of Sino-Tibetan language. Hence they are entirely different language systems,which differ widely in syntactic structures. One of the striking discrepancies is thatmultiple pre-attributives can be placed in front of or behind the headwords in Englishnoun phrases. On the contrary, in general, there are a lot of left-branching structures inChinese, that is, the headwords in noun phrases are followed by multiplepre-attributives. This syntactic difference will pose a huge obstacle to the interpreterswhen they interpret Chinese into English especially meeting with complex noun phraseswith multiple pre-attributives in the simultaneous mode for they have to receive thesource language bit by bit. Therefore the interpreters shall be quite familiar withconversion principle between the two language systems and adopt some effective tacticsso as to produce the target language quickly and accurately in accordance with the ruleof English syntactic structures. In recent years, interpreting experts and scholars havedone more and more study and researches concerning how to interpret noun phraseswith multiple pre-attributives in interpreting. Nevertheless, most study mainly focuseson consecutive interpreting or most researches are done in terms of the interpreters’ ownexperience and there is little study which is made on the basis of experiment from anobjective perspective.In the study, the author selected8second-year postgraduate students majoring inEnglish interpreting as experimental subjects and simulated a true conference ofinvestment promotion interpreted in the form of simultaneous interpreting in amulti-media and audio-visual classroom. The author made a preparation of a materialwhich was a live recording of the speakers whose speeches covered not only in Chinesebut also in English. It was interpreted by the8subjects as the simultaneous interpreters.Meanwhile, the interpreting was recorded by the author synchronously. After theexperiment, transcribing the speeches of Chinese speakers into texts, selecting20 typical long and complex sentences including noun phrases with multiplepre-attributives from it and then transcribing the relevant interpreting as corpus, theauthor carried out a comparative study, making an analysis of how the interpreterscoped with noun phrases with multiple pre-attributives in the process ofChinese-English simultaneous interpreting, what tactics they had taken, and whichtactic they adopted most and efficiently for the performance as well as the quality of theinterpreting. What’s more, what tactics had a positive correlation with the quality ofinterpreting was also explored from the experiment and data analysis.Through the experiment and data analysis, first of all, the author finds thatinterpreters have much difficulty in dealing with noun phrases with multiplepre-attributives in Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting for the significantdifference between Chinese and English syntactic structures, which can definitely lowerquality of interpreting especially its accuracy and coherence. However, the interpretersutilize certain tactics such as chunking, anticipation, omission, waiting and stalling tointerpret long and complex noun phrases from Chinese to English, so as to achieve thegoal of saving time and energy, improving efficiency and guaranteeing the quality ofinterpreting. Secondly, the tactic that the interpreters adopted most is chunking, whichhas been proved from the empirical study to be the most effective and the most usefulfor improving the accuracy and coherence of interpreting. What’s more, there exists apositive correlation between taking chunking tactic and the accuracy of interpreting.Anticipation comes second among frequency of the tactics to tackle complex nounphrases, which has no positive correlation with the performance of interpreting. Fromwhat has been proved above, the author recommends practice of interpreting tacticssuch as chunking, anticipation, and omission should be strengthened, which will bebeneficial for the speed, coherence and accuracy of interpreting.