Hedges In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Hedges,such as sort of,probably,I think,He says,play an important role in daily communication.Hedges refer to utterances used as strategies to enhance or reduce the fuzziness of a propositions based on speaker's commitment to the truth as well as to achieve the communicative effects and pragmatic functions.Ever since the proposition by Zadeh in 1972,the study of hedges has been enriched and conducted in various disciplines including semantics,pragmatics,discourse analysis,etc.However,there are relatively rare researches focused on the hedges in translation,not to mention the related empirical studies on hedges in interpreting.The theoretical basis adopted in this thesis is Daniel Gile's Effort Models.The author has searched CNKI and found that there has been no literature using Effort Models to analyze hedges in interpreting.Based on the research findings of previous empirical studies,student interpreters mainly preserve,omit and add hedges when dealing with hedges in consecutive interpreting(CI).To better understand the reasons of the performance of student interpreters,the author carries out an empirical research on the performance of student interpreters dealing with hedges in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting in the hope that a new theoretical perspective could be applicable and a few suggestions on the training of student interpreters could be provided.The author tries to find out the ways of dealing with hedges of student interpreters in Chinese-English(C-E)CI and the corresponding reasons.Then the reasons unveiled will be classified based on Gile's Effort Models to see which effort plays a comparatively significant role in interpretation.It should be mentioned that the material chosen is about business interpreting and the speaker produced the source text(ST)without a written script in hand.It is found that student interpreters tend to preserve,omit or add hedges in the process of C-E CI.Nearly half of the hedges in the ST are preserved in the target text(TT)and the rest are omitted.The preservation rate and omission rate of hedges under each subcategory are disproportional to thefrequencies of hedges in the ST.Preservation is mainly dependent on note-taking effort,memory effort and production effort.More than half of the preserved hedges are noted down by student interpreters to facilitate the interpretation.The others are preserved when the student interpreters have no major difficulty in comprehending the ST and can easily memorize its internal logic.Omission in the thesis is divided based on whether the student interpreters consciously choose to omit the hedges.One is unconscious omission,which is caused by improper cognitive capacity distribution and the other one is conscious omission,which means student interpreters opt to omit the hedges according to their own judgement during interpretation.Over three quarters of the omitted hedges are related to listening and analysis effort.Student interpreters tend to omit the hedges unconsciously once it is relatively hard for them to understand and capture the information in the ST.But several hedges are consciously omitted because student interpreters regard them as less important information or redundancy when they are listening to and analyzing the ST.In addition,hedges are omitted sometimes because student interpreters fail to read their notes or clearly memorize the hedges.As for addition,there are over one third of the hedges in the TT are newly added.The frequency of the newly added hedges are proportional to the frequency of the hedges in ST to some extent.Over half of the added hedges are connected with production effort.The reasons of adding hedges in this regards are(1)to make the implicit information in the ST explicit;(2)to help the speaker better realize the communicative intent;(3)to correct the speaker's proposition;(4)personal interpreting habits;(5)to protect student interpreters from making mistakes in the TT.The rest of the added hedges are associated with memory effort.The student interpreters add hedges to express the speaker's strong tone in the TT,which is felt and memorized when they are receiving the ST.