The Relationship Between Deverbalization And Performance In English-to-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

In its half-a-century long history,the Interpretive Theory of Translation,with a large amount of criticism it has attracted,has provoked only a handful of empirical studies to examine the application of this theory in interpreting practice.This paper,therefore,aims to examine the relationship between deverbalization,a central stage of translation,and the performance in English-to-Chinese interpreting to provide an empirical view to this theory.The hypothesis proposed in this dissertation is:in English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting(SI),the higher the level of deverbalization,the better the student interpreters'performance.The two variables here are the level of deverbalization and interpreter's performance.The former is measured by four indicators:reformulation,explanation,connection and localization;the latter also by four indicators:accuracy,integrity,logical coherence and fluency.Ten students were invited to participate in the test where whey were asked to do SI for a segment of material extracted from a financial training workshop.Based on the transcripts of the interpreters' and the speakers' speeches,the correlation coefficient between deverbalization and performance was calculated.Data shows that there is a high,positive correlation between the two.The hypothesis of the test,as a result,is supported.This paper also examines respectively the correlation between the four indicators of deverbalization and performance,and that between deverbalization and the four performance indicators,and finds that there is strong positive correlation between reformulation,connection as well as localization and performance,and that between deverbalization and accuracy as well as fluency.This study finds that the reformulation of sentence constituents,coherence-oriented integration of the connection elements and idiomatic wording can help improve the SI performance.This is of relevance to English-to-Chinese SI teaching and practice.