A Report On The Simulated Simultaneous Interpretation Of 2014 President Obama’s Weekly Address: Difficulties And Strategies Of Interpreting Attributive Clauses

This report is concerned with the simulated E-C simultaneous interpretation (SI) project of 2014 President Obama’s Weekly Address, from which 16 addresses were selected, and focuses on difficulties and methods of interpreting attributive clauses. The project is a personal practice meant to improve the author’s interpreting skills.SI is a real-time immediate and just-for-once performance that involves massive and parallel information processing. In addition, due to differences between Chinese and English in sentence structures, some attributive clauses give rise to difficulty in interpretation. There are two major types of difficulties. One is that long attributive clauses which upload excessive information hinder the transference of linguistic and sense structures under limited time and short-memory in SI. The other is that the position of attributive clauses that set within or at the end of the sentences and lack semantic markers, hinders the transference of linguistic structure and sentential logic.According to the Interpretive Theory, interpretation is a communicative process, the target of which is not the language used by the speaker but the sense intended to convey. Guided by the proposed Triangular Model and its essential three stages of comprehension, de-verbalization, and expression, attributive clauses were comprehended by sense units, and real meaning and logic were extracted in combination with short-memory and cognitive complements and then re-expressed in the target language.When interpreting long attributive clauses or sentences containing 2 or more attributive clauses, splitting was adopted according to linguistic structure and sense units. For interpreting attributive clauses set within or at the end of the sentences that lack semantic markers, syntactic linearity and condensation were preferred.