An Empirical Report On The Impact Of Ba-construction In C-E Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Prototype Theory

Ba-construction has been a special clausal construction in modern Chinese and a hot topic in linguistic study.While it is complex in its syntactic structure,there are also many differences among different varieties of ba-construction sentences in its semantic aspect.Therefore,to have a complete comprehension of ba-construction requires a thorough observation from different aspects.In interpreting,to make full sense of the source text is the precondition for interpreters to interpret smoothly and give excellent translation in the target language.To do this effectively,native Chinese interpreters should have mastery of the Chinese language.In this thesis,the author carries out an experiment to study whether ba-construction in source text influences the interpreters' performances and when the influences occur,i.e.in the process or in the results.In this experiment,materials are texts with ba-construction sentences.The author will first analyze the materials' feature based on prototype theory and predict the performance of subjects accordingly.10 subjects who are from the major of English Interpreting of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies are the experiment group and are tested by consecutively interpreting 15 sentences in the same environment.After the test,their performances are analyzed and translations contrasted with the professional interpreter's.The author finds that professional interpreters have a more flexible strategy in dealing with complicated sentences,while novice interpreters are more easily affected by the structure of sentences and find it difficult to have a proper strategy.This may be explained as a novice interpreters' lack of knowledge of special construction and experience.Based on the conclusion,the author thinks that novice interpreters should pay more attention to strategies on interpreting special constructions and even summarize what they have accumulated.As for interpreting-teaching,attention should also be paid to this aspect,lessons on Chinese and Chinese special structure can be added into the curriculum.Students and teachers could work together to enrich current teaching materials.