Information Shifts In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

The concept of “translation shift” is first put forward by British linguist and translation theorist Catford in his book A Linguistic Theory of Translation,referring to the translation phenomenon of departing from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to the target language.Both Western and Chinese researchers touched upon different aspects of translation shift.This thesis attempts to give an overall description of information shifts in consecutive interpreting and probe into the possible causes of information shifts that occur in the materials.To figure out the categories of information shifts in C-E CI,their distribution as well as the possible causes behind these information shifts,this thesis studies the five press conferences of China's NPC and CPPCC sessions from 2013-2017.Drawing from the classifications formulated in previous studies,the author will classify information shifts based on the materials.Information shifts in this research are divided into addition,elaboration,substitution and omission.The author analyzes the types of information shifts in the collected data in a qualitative way,counts the occurrence of each type,and presents the percentages of their occurrence.The result shows that among four types of information shifts,omission occupies the largest share,followed by elaboration,substitution and addition.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis,and combining with the Relevance Theory,the author observes possible causes for the information shifts that occur in the materials.First,the appearance of information shifts helps overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers between Chinese and English.Second,the occurrence of information shifts can realize the time-based efficiency of the press conferences.