The Use Of Cohesion In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Cohesion plays a vital role in language quality due to its direct influence of the cohesiveness and logic of texts.It has become a popular topic in interpreting studies in recent years.To probe into the situation of the use of cohesion among interpreters,many scholars have conducted comparative studies of professional interpreters and novice interpreters.The materials used in these studies are mainly from consecutive interpreting in diplomatic events.This is because diplomatic events have high standards for the quality of interpreting and consecutive interpreting is commonly used in such settings.However,former researches have shortcomings in methodology and data analysis,failing to present a comprehensive view of the real situation.Aiming to fill the gap between previous studies,this study adopts the cohesion theory by Halliday and Hassan and form a new coding system that covers the 15 cohesive devices under the main 5 categories,namely reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion.To collect data,8 novice interpreters are invited to do interpreting for the speeches of Premier Li Keqiang in a press conference in 2017.And the interpreting of Zhang Lu,the professional interpreter of this press conference,is used for comparison.The original speech and outputs of the professional interpreter and novice interpreters are transcribed and marked according to the coding system.And frequencies of different cohesion devices in different texts are counted.For data analysis,the frequencies arc compared to see the general differences and examples are used to analyze detailed differences and reasons behind them.The results suggest that the professional interpreter outperforms novice interpreters in the awareness of using cohesive devices,skillful adjustment of cohesive devices while facing cultural and linguistic differences and making no grammatical mistakes of using a pair of conjunctions in the same sentence,which is quite common among novice interpreters.According to the results,novice interpreters should raise their awareness of using cohesive devices,pay attention to cultural and linguistic differences while choosing cohesion strategies,and increase self-monitoring ability and bilingual competence.