An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between The Left-branching Structure And The Interpreter’s Performance In C-E Simultaneous Interpretation

Branching is a linguistic phenomenon describing the spatial relationship between the modifier and nucleus. In the Chinese language, left branching, which means the nucleus is located at the end of a sentence, is more frequent. In the English language, however, right branching, which means the nucleus is located at the beginning of a sentence, is more frequent. This difference brings to the interpreter a problem. For example, in C-E interpreting, the interpreter has to wait for the nucleus before starting a sentence, which means a big burden for short term memory (STM) and may cause inconsistent ear-to-voice-span (EVS). While in E-C interpreting, the interpreter gets the nucleus earlier but has to wait for the modifier to start a sentence due to the syntactical feature of the Chinese language. This also means a lot of pressure on EVS.The writer has designed an experiment for this dissertation, i.e. a C-E simultaneous interpretation experiment. I have picked a text with typical left-branching structures and invited7students majoring in E-C simultaneous interpreting to interpret the texts. The experiment is bound by the principle of single variable.This thesis will:first, construct a theoretical framework by analyzing Chinese and English structuring using linguistic theories; second, find what impacts branching has on interpreters using experiments and Gile’s Effort Model. The writer also attempts to find the relationship between interpreters’performance and the length of specifier of left branching structures in simultaneous interpreting.