Explicitation In Chinese-english Simultaneous Interpreting

The concept of “explicitation” is firstly introduced by French scholars Vinay and Darbelnet,referring to the translation strategy of making the implied meaning in the source text more explicit in the target text.Since explicitation was recognized as the universal features of translation by scholars represented by Mona Baker,many researches have adopted corpus-based studies on interpreting,helping an in-depth understanding of explicitation and translation universals.However,as pointed out by some researchers,corpus based study has its limitations.It can only retrieve explicitations at lexical,grammatical and textual levels,not able to reaching meaning based explicitations.Hence it is still necessary to manually identify and describe explicitation.Most studies on explicitation focus on translation.In terms of the Chinese and English language pair,consecutive interpreting is paid much more attention than simultaneous interpreting.To figure out the categories of explicitation in C-E SI and the frequencies of their occurrence as well as the motivations,this study takes Chinese national leaders' keynote speech delivered at Boao Forum for Asia from 2012 to 2016,and the correspondent simultaneous interpreting by professional interpreters as a case study.Drawing from the framework of explicitation in interpreting formulated by Tang Fang(2014),which is based on three metafunctions of language and the Appraisal System,explicitation in this study is divided into three categories: experiential explicitation,interpersonal explicitation and textual explicitation.Within each type,there are several subtypes.Based on the framework,the author explores the types of explicitation in the collected data in a qualitative way,counts the occurrence of each type and presents the amount and percentage of their occurrence.The result shows that each categories of explicitation can be found in the data.Among the three types of explicitation,textual explicitation occupies the largest share,followed by experiential explicitation and interpersonal explicitation.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis,and combining with Effort Model for SI and the Relevance Theory,the author observes three possible motivations for the explicitation phenomenon.First,the interpreter explicitates the information to overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers between Chinese and English.Second,to convey the intention of the speaker and meanwhile attend the cognitive context of the audience,the interpreter tends to add information so as to seek optimal relevance.Third,due to constraints in simultaneous interpreting,the interpreter has to save and coordinate efforts to ensure the output quality,so he/she has to cut the long sentences in the original speech,which incurs the explicitation shifts.