An Empirical Study On English-Chinese Summary Interpreting By Means Of Semantic Information Chains

Human beings'capability of grasping the gist of a discourse is an important cognitive power. However, how this power is formed remains a mystery according to the relevant literature available. For example, how can people identify the central meaning within the utterances and dispose of information that is irrelevant to the central point? Summary Interpreting, an advanced cognitive performance, can shed light on those puzzles. The theory of information structure points out that in communication, information is conveyed from what is already known to the hearer to what is unknown as new information, within which the message stressed by the speaker stands out as information focus. Such focuses are connected through lexical chains, thus forming semantic information chains. A successful rendering of summary interpreting must not only reproduce the gist of the speech, but also follow an organizing structure similar to source language and filter redundant information. An interpreter can identify the central meaning through information focuses within the utterances, sort out the organization of the discourse through lexical chains, and dispose of information that bears little connection to the such chains. The author firstly hypothesizes that semantic information chain plays a very important role in catching the gist of the discourse. Secondly the author conducts a case study based on a number of contestants'performances in a summary interpreting competition to confirm the hypothesis. Thirdly, the author designs a Semantic Task Model of English-Chinese Summary Interpreting from the perspective of semantic information chains, hoping to illustrate how such interconnected lexical relations as synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, hyponymy, and repetition enable an interpreter to make assumptions about the purport of a discourse, which is, by nature, the speaker's goal. Another comparative experiment is then conducted to test the instructive value of this model in daily summary interpreting practices. And finally it is concluded that information focuses and lexical chains are of great value in terms of extracting the gist of source language, sorting out the discourse structure, and unveiling the speaker's goal in summary interpreting. This thesis is organized in five chapters: chapter one introduces why the author determines English-Chinese summary interpreting as the subject of study; chapter two is a review of relevant studies on information focus and lexical chains, from which the concept of semantic information chain is proposed; in the next chapter the author proves the relevance between semantic information chains and performances of summary interpreting by conducting a case study and a comparative experiment, and next suggests a tentative semantic task model of English-Chinese summary interpreting; chapter four elicits five feasible strategies for summary interpreting practices based on the model and points out the downsides of it; the last chapter concludes the major achievements of this paper and attempts to suggest its future areas of broadening.