Choice And Employment Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese To English Consecutive Interpretation

As the world becomes increasingly globalized,more and more international exchanges and cooperation activities have been undertaken,which leads to a growing demand for qualified conference interpreters.Compared with simultaneous interpreters,audience always place higher expectations on consecutive interpreters and expect them to convey the message fluently with clearer logic and higher accuracy since they have more time to comprehend and process the information.Consecutive interpreting,in fact,poses huge challenges to interpreters' background knowledge,short-term working memory and stress coping strategies.The types and frequencies of use of cohesive devices in Chinese and English are rather different,which,to some degree,determines that cohesive devices must be chosen and employed in accordance with semantic and pragmatic habits of the language into which the interpreter is working.It is particularly true with Chinese-English interpreting.Based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan,this thesis conducts analysis on five commonly used cohesive devices in English,namely,reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion,and explores the significant roles cohesive devices play in improving textual coherence.Taking the mock press conference on the 4th World Internet Conference as an example,the author identifies where cohesive devices are missing or improperly used in Chinese-English interpreting,analyzes reasons behind textual incoherence and employs appropriate cohesive devices accordingly.By comparing the differences between the original version and the revised one,the thesis summarizes and develops four strategies which enable interpreters to better choose and employ cohesive devices and offer more inspirations to both teaching and learning.