Shifts On Orality/Literacy In C-E Consecutive Interpreting

Many interpreting scholars believe that interpreting products should not only be faithful to the content,but also to the style of the ST(Herbert 1952).However,in interpreting practices,keeping perfectly faithful to the content and style of ST is hardly achieved and there are always shifts more or less.Miriam Shlesinger(1989),through an empirical research,proved that,when the ST is markedly oral,SI would decrease its orality and increase literacy;when the ST is markedly literate,SI would decrease its literacy and increase orality,which is called the orality/literacy shifts.Yet,the author finds that,such shifts are obvious and inevitable not only in SI,but also in CI.After reading through previous studies concerning orality/literacy shifts in CI,the author observed that many research findings were made upon the analysis of one interpreting recording,lacking the support of a larger corpus.Besides,some parameters in previous studies are hard to spot and quantify,and not applicable to both English and Chinese.Therefore,the author invites 6 subjects and attempts to re-verify the hypothesis that there're orality/literacy shifts in CI through different parameters and then explores the reasons.According to the Effort Model(Daniel Gile,2009),the outcome of an interpreting task is determined by the balance between the supply of energy of the interpreter and the demand of efforts of the task.Since a literate text is usually characterized by high information density,it naturally needs more cognitive efforts of the interpreter to accomplish the interpreting.The efforts left with the interpreter to monitor the delivery are squeezed.While an oral text is usually featured by low information density,it often poses less pressure on the cognitive effort of an interpreter,hence the interpreter has more energy to spare.The dynamic rivalry between the supply of energy and demand of efforts could be the reason for the orality/literacy shifts in interpreting,including consecutive interpreting.In order to prove the hypothesis,the author invited 6 subjects who have received one-year interpreting training in GDUFS and passed the exam of CATTI-2(English interpreting).Meanwhile,the author chose two speeches,one of which is oral and the other is literate.Based on the study made by Hong&Wang(??????2011),the author kept 7 out of the 10 parameters employed in their study and added a new one to assess the orality and literacy of a text.The selection of parameters is in accordance with the following requirements:1)all of them are both the features of orality and literacy in English and Chinese;2)all of them are easy to spot and quantify.3)all of them are applicable to the texts of this case study.By calculating the incidences of the eight parameters both in the ST and TT,it can be found whether there're changes in incidences of parameters after CI,thus confirming whether there're orality/literacy shifts in C-E consecutive interpreting.The results show that the same shifts also exist with consecutive interpreting,When the ST is oral,C-E consecutive interpreting decreases its orality and increases literacy;when the ST is literate,C-E consecutive interpreting decreases its literacy and increases orality.