Practice-based Analysis Of Cohesive Devices In English-chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

Simultaneous interpretation refers to a kind of oral translation practice with high demand.It requires the interpreter to reconstruct the ideas,thoughts or emotions expressed by a source language into those by a target language at nearly the same pace as the speaker's.In the process of simultaneous interpretation,the speaker usually emits out information continuously,to relive the mental stress and decrease the memory load,the interpreters would usually apply certain principles or techniques,of which,segmentation and cohesive devices are usually deemed as the most crucial and significant.The paper,based on the research results from some predecessors and the simulated practice by the author,aims to analyze some cohesive difficulties and devices in E-C simultaneous interpretation practices.The paper,as an interpretation practice report,represents an analysis and summary of the simulated practice project of simultaneous interpretation for the State of the Union Address by Obama in 2015.This project chooses Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion Theory as well as Reiss and Vermeer's Skopos Theory as the theoretical guidance for the purpose of improving both theoretical knowledge and practical skills of interpretation.The practice material chosen is the video of the State of the Union address by Obama in 2015.The author first downloaded the live video from the Internet,divided the whole video into two sections,carried out a simultaneous interpretation task with text to the two sections.In the meanwhile,the author audio-recorded the whole SI process.After the interpretation,the author listened to the process for many times and transcribed the interpretation part of the audio file into text.Then,the author analyzed both the source language(SL)text and target language(TL)text based on Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion Theory as well as Reiss and Vermeer's Skopos Theory from several different perspectives.Based on systematic case analysis,the paper expounds and demonstrates the primary basis for choosing a cohesive device during the simultaneous interpretation,that is,the purpose of a target text;the paper also proposes and summarizes several specific and effective devices for cohesion,i.e.,addition of logical connectives,use of referential expressions,repetition of antecedent information and ellipsis of function words.The paper combines the preparation before interpretation,the simultaneous interpretation(SI)process,cohesive difficulties and devices as well as many other factors and analyzes real examples from the interpretation practice.Hopefully,it may make some contribution to the study of interpretation training and provide certain reference for improving interpretation quality to other interpreters.