The Oral And Literate Shifts In Military Conference Interpreting

This thesis takes the oral and literate shifts in the simultaneous interpreting at the 7th Xiangshan Forum as the research object.With the statistical methodology,the author makes quality evaluation of the Chinese-to-English(C-E)and English-to-Chinese(E-C)simultaneous interpreting at the 7th Xiangshan Forum,expecting to find the effects of these shifts on the target texts,summarizing the affecting parameters,analyzing the reasons behind the shifts and proposing a series of improvement suggestions.Israeli interpreting researcher Shlesinger carried out an experiment on the oral and literate shifts in the real Hebrew-English simultaneous interpreting materials and found that there exists an equalizing effect of interpretation on the position of a text on the oral-literate continuum.In this case,the “equalizing effect” increases the orality of the corresponding target text of a markedly literate source text and the literacy in the target text of a markedly oral source text.Since then,the equalizing effect has drawn many researchers' attention and has been proved in the interpretation of many other languages.However,the relationship between this effect and interpreting quality has not been studied yet.Therefore,based on previous studies,the author attempts to figure out whether there is an equalizing effect in military conference interpreting,and answer the following questions.Is Shlesinger's finding of equalizing effect applicable to military conference interpreting? If so,how do these effects affect interpreting quality? What are the reasons behind these shifts?With these questions in mind,the author conducted a quantitative research on the simultaneous interpreting materials at the 7th Xiangshan Forum with the statistical method.Based on the theory of stylistics,the author also made qualitative analyses of the features of spoken and written languagesshared by both Chinese and English,and obtained 10 parameters in three categories.After data collection,a computation of these parameters was then conducted with R in order to find the characteristics of the oral and literate shifts in the Chinese military conference interpreting.The results show that oral and literate shifts do exist in the simultaneous interpreting at the 7th Xiangshan Forum.The effect of oral shifts is significant whereas the effect of literate shifts appears to be insignificant,and all target texts are markedly oral.Meanwhile,to better explain the relationship between the equalizing effect and interpreting quality,the author tried to establish an analytical model and ended up in finding that the markedly oral characteristics degrade the interpreting quality,which is mainly reflected by the wide existence of filled pauses,repetitions,corrections and the use of modal particles.Based on the Effort Model proposed by Daniel Gile,the markedly oral characteristics result from the mental pressure brought by the high standard of the Forum,as well as the unfamiliarity with or lack of domain knowledge.Besides,strong accents of the experts and scholars from different countries also negatively affect the interpreters' performances,interpreting quality and information transmission.On the basis of the theoretical analysis and empirical study,the author proposed a number of suggestions for improving the military conference interpreting.Firstly,interpreters are well advised to enhance their consciousness of oral and literate shifts,knowing the differences between the source language and the target language,and having a better understanding of language changes during simultaneous interpreting.In this way,interpreters can adjust their interpreting strategies to different styles of the source language.Secondly,it is necessary to strengthen the interpreters' capacity of coping with interpreting disfluency through the preparation and application of fixed interpretation phrases,and the multitasking training.Thirdly,it isnecessary to improve the MTI education in military academies,which provides an important pool of military interpreters.Apart from improving language and interpreting abilities of would-be interpreters,MTI education should pay more attention to students' ability of language expression,knowledge reserve and advance preparation and anti-pressure abilities,so as to enable them to adapt to different environments and different topics in their future work.