On Normalization In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

The past decades have witnessed the emergence and development of corpus-based research as a new paradigm in translation study.Corpus-based translation studies have greatly promoted the study of translation universals,which includes simplification,explicitation,normalization and some other features.Much more research has been done on simplification and explicitation than on normalization which has not been attached much importance to.Thus,to verify the normalization hypothesis and to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of interpretation behavior,the present study aims to systematically explore the normalization in consecutive interpreting by comparing novice interpreters and professional interpreters and to find out the causes.A self-built parallel corpus would serve as the foundation of this study and translation universals as the theoretical framework.Such work is based on the following assumptions:1)Normalization does exist in C-E consecutive interpreting;2)Normalization of novice interpreters and professional interpreters is manifested in different aspects;3)Causes of normalization are different in terms of novice interpreters and professional interpreters.The current study aims to establish a Corpus of Li Keqiang's Diplomatic Speech and its Interpretation(CLDSI),which consists of three sub-corpora—Corpus of the Original Text of Li Keqiang's Diplomatic Speech(COTLKD),Corpus of Professional Interpretation(CPI)and Corpus of Novice Interpretation(CNI).Two interpreters are selected as the research objectives.The first one is from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.And the second one is currently studying in Central China Normal University,majoring in English Interpretation.The dissertation is divided into five parts.The first part is Introduction.The second part helps to lay a theoretical foundation from the perspective of translation universals,definition of normalization,relations between normalization and translation,as well as interpretation.Part three is devoted to the description of Methodology,consisting of corpus design,research procedure and analytical tools.Data analysis would be carried out in part four.Paralinguistic features,nominalized words and passive voice would all be studied precisely.The conclusion part is about the outcome,causes and advises for interpreters.The study finds that normalization exists in the process of Chinese-English consecutive interpretation.However,normalization indicators and frequency in professional interpretation exceeds that in novice interpretation.Interpreting competence,audiences' expectation,and style of text all serve as motivations of normalization in interpreting.The study yields insight into normalization in translation studies as well as the nature of consecutive interpretation.As with all corpus-based researches,this research cannot avoid some limitations in corpus size,corpus annotation,etc.Suggestions for further research are proposed concerning more refined methodology,better corpus composition,and in-depth corpus annotation in order to facilitate the reliability the research.