A Study On C-E CI Information Reformulation Patterns Of Student Interpreters

The ultimate goal of any kind of communication is to convey information,not to mention the communication between two different languages.However,to convey information from one language to another,especially for those languages belonging to different families such as Chinese and English,there are a plethora of difficulties involved,making information reformulation not only necessary but obligatory.Reformulation has been an often sought-after object of research in the past few years;however,most of the relative research is confined to professional interpreters only or a specific interpreting activity of a single one student interpreter.The general reformulation patterns,especially of the student interpreters,remains to be a virgin territory.Therefore,this dissertation is dedicated to exploring reformulation patterns in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting of student interpreters via the lens of information theory.To conduct this research,ten postgraduates majoring in interpreting from the School of Interpreting and Translation Studies in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies were invited to take part in an experiment.All of these students have undergone at least one year of professional consecutive interpreting training,and have been certified as an interpreter.Each student interpreter's performance was recorded and transcribed accordingly.The transcription was segmented into information units and then further segmented into information knots.The information knots were further tagged and analyzed from the perspective of “7Ws” according to information theory on three levels,namely content,linguistic realization,and communication.According to the experiment,student interpreters performed very well in terms of reformulating information units and information knots as well.When reformulating information,student interpreters tended to reformulate on word and phrase level,sentence level and discourse level.Besides,language accuracy,language quality and logic are the three paramount factors that student interpreters value the most in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting.What's more,the more inclined a student to reformulate information,the better his/her performance on information completeness would be.The research shows that student interpreters performed immaculately in terms of information completeness.But when it comes to information accuracy,language use which includes grammar and paralinguistic information,and communication which includes logic and communication effect,student interpreters fared unsatisfactorily in general.