An Experiment On The Impact Of Syntactical Markedness On The Interpreting Performance Of Student Interpreters

Markedness is pervasive in language.It is held that almost every sentence can be categorized into marked item and unmarked item respectively.In this thesis,the simplest affirmative declarative sentence is considered to be the unmarked sentence,while those sentences with complex structures and unusual word orders,like the interrogative sentence,the emphatic sentence,the inverted sentence,the double negative sentence and the sentence with subordinate clauses are regarded as marked sentences.Compared with unmarked items,marked items are more complex in structure.Besides it takes more cognitive efforts including time to comprehend and process marked items.Therefore,when interpreting marked sentences,interpreters need to pay more cognitive efforts or pay more attention to processing them.Moreover,as interpreting is a one-time presentation,interpreters are required to offer a translation within a very limited time.For these reasons,marked sentences definitely pose a great challenge to interpreters under time pressure.Thus the author proposes a hypothesis that marked sentences have an impact on the interpreting performance of student interpreters.In order to verify the hypothesis,the author designed an interpreting experiment and invited 30 MTI students from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies to participate in an E-C interpreting test.In the experiment,30 subjects were randomly divided into two groups.After the experiment,the author transcribes the outputs of 30 participants and rated their interpreting performance in terms of fluency,completeness of content and accuracy of expression.The experimental results indicate that there is a significant difference in the interpreting performance of the two groups of participants.Participants who interpreted the unmarked text score higher than those who interpreted the marked text.In addition,more errors and disfluencies are detected when the participants interpret the marked text.Supported by the experimental data,the hypothesis proposed in this paper has been verified.And syntactical markedness influences the performance of student interpreters in the aspects of information completeness and fluency of the output.