Quality Analysis Of Chinese-English Sight Translation Between Professional Interpreters And Student Interpreters

Sight translation refers to the oral translation of a written text.Sight translation is a vital skill in interpreter training,which can improve students' bilingual conversion abilities.However,previous studies of interpreting quality focused more on consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting rather than sight translation.Studies on sight translation started later than other types of traditional interpreting,generating a relatively small number of such studies.Among them,the empirical and comparative studies on the quality of sight translation are insufficient.Regarding how to improve its guidance of interpreting teaching,this paper mainly analyzed the differences in quality of Chinese-English sight translation between professional interpreters and student interpreters through error analysis.Additionally,semi-structured interviews were conducted among all interpreters as supplements.Effective strategies were expected to be found to improve the quality of interpreters' Chinese-English sight translation.This thesis explored the quality of Chinese-English sight translation of the interpreters from three aspects,namely accuracy,language quality,and delivery.Twenty-three graduate interpreters from the School of English and International Studies,Beijing Foreign Studies University,and seven professional interpreters with three to ten years of interpreting experience were selected as participants of this research.The testing material was extracted from the speech made by the former state councilor Dai Bingguo in Zambia.After completing the Chinese-English sight translation task,all 30 participants recorded their oral self-reflections on their performance according to the semi-structured clues.Once finished,the author collected,transcribed,coded,and analyzed all the sight translation recordings and self-reflection recordings.Results show that,on average,in terms of accuracy,student interpreters have 32.2%more omissions,10.9%more distortions,and 51.4%fewer additions than professional interpreters.Omissions are mainly about adverbial modifiers and attributes in the source text.Most distortions are about the adjectives and nouns that are hard to understand or express in the source text.Additions are mainly about some abstract information.In terms of language quality,student interpreters have 29.8%more syntax errors,94%more lexical errors,and 80.4%more grammatical errors than professional interpreters.Among the lexical errors,the major difference between the two sides is that student interpreters make wrong comparative forms of adjectives,simple past tense errors,part of speech errors,and calques or corrupted lexical errors,while professional interpreters rarely have such errors.As for delivery,professional interpreters have higher delivery rates,17.5%fewer voiced pauses,and 56.1%fewer repairs than student interpreters.Based on the self-reflections of all participants,this article explores the difficulties in sight translation,such as parallelism and proper nouns.By a comparative analysis of professional interpreters' performances,this thesis proposes some strategies and skills such as avoiding literal translation,taking advantage of condensation strategy,syntactic linearity principle,and so on to improve student interpreters' Chinese-English sight translation quality.