An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Syntactic Difference On E-C Sight Translation And Simultaneous Interpreting In Light Of Gile’s Effort Model

Syntactic difference between the source language and the target language is a problem trigger prevalent in interpreting,especially when the language pair is strikingly very different.English and Chinese have distinctive dissimilarity in their syntactic structure because one is right-branching structure and the other is left-branching structure.According to Gile’s effort model,problem triggers such as syntactic difference will increase the cognitive burden on interpreters,leading to various interpreting failures.Yet despite its prevalence in interpreting studies,not too much attention has been paid to the impact of syntactic difference on interpreting,especially interpreting under the language pair of English and Chinese.Thus,the present study sets out to investigate the effect of syntactic difference on English to Chinese sight translation(ST)and simultaneous interpreting(SI)under the theoretical framework of Gile’s Effort Model.To be specific,it focuses on what influence will syntactic asymmetry have on the interpreting accuracy,fluency and strategies of E-C ST and SI and attempts to explain such impact through the lens of Effort Model.An experiment is designed to probe into this topic.The interpreting accuracy is evaluated on the frequency of errors and omissions,and the interpreting fluency is evaluated on the occurrence of filled pauses,unfilled pauses,repair and repetitions.And interpreting strategies used by interpreters to handle syntactic difference are also identified by carefully compare the source language and the interpreted target text.The results show that,first,in terms of interpreting accuracy,ST has more errors than omissions while SI has more omissions than errors.And an independent sample TTest reveals that there is significant difference in accuracy between ST and SI.Second,as for fluency,the T-Test doesn’t show significant difference between ST and SI,suggesting that under the effect of syntactic difference,interpreting fluency is not dependent on modes of interpreting.Finally,it is also found that three strategies are employed by interpreters to handle the impact of syntactic difference: shadowing the original source language structure,restructuring the source language structure into a word order that is natural in the target language,and simplifying original sourcelanguage structure.And the results show that the shadowing strategy is the dominant interpreting strategy in both ST and SI,probably an intentional choice made by interpreters to relieve cognitive burden brought by syntactic difference.It is also found that SI uses the simplifying strategy more often than ST,revealing that SI may face a higher cognitive load than ST when facing the problem trigger of syntactic difference.