A Corpus-assisted Study Of Operational Norms In Diplomatic Press Conference Interpreting

Over the past decades,the study of translational norms has been thriving and brought many fruitful results.However,its focus lies mainly on written translation,and few scholars have explored the norms in interpreting.The study of interpreting norms can contribute to quality assessment as it gives a general idea of the actual performance of interpreters.Toury’s theory of translational norms can provide a comprehensive perspective for such a study.Specifically,Toury’s translational norms include three types of norms:(1)preliminary norms,which are concerned with “translation policy”(factors affecting the translator’s choice of text)and “directness of translation”(the translator’s acceptance for translating texts from languages other than the ultimate source language);(2)initial norms,which refer to the “adequacy”(adherence to the source language cultures)and “acceptability”(leaning towards the target language cultures)of the translation;(3)operational norms,including matricial norms(fullness and distribution of the translation)and textual-linguistic norms(lexical features and formulation of the translation).As the operational norms shed light on the micro-level decisions of translators,this thesis will analyze the operational norms in interpreting.Therefore,the present study intends to examine the operational norms in diplomatic press conference Chinese-to-English simultaneous interpreting in light of Toury’s theory of translational norms with the assistance of a small self-built corpus featuring the regular press conferences held daily by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MOFA)of China.Besides,the present study also analyzes the officially revised version posted on the official websites of MOFA to examine the changes made to the simultaneous interpretation.Research findings show that the operational norms of simultaneous interpreting in diplomatic press conferences manifest the following five behavioral strategies.First,the strategy of simplification.The simultaneous interpreters tend to simplify the syntactic structures of the sentences and segment them into shorter sentences with fewer syntactic components.Second,the strategy of explicitation.The simultaneous interpreters are likely to render the elaborating conjunctive adjuncts explicit.Third,the strategy of reduction.There are primarily two categories of reductions in simultaneous interpreting.One is active reduction,which involves omitting information that the audience may infer from the context.The other is passive reduction,in which the interpreter merely fails to convey the content of the source utterances.Fourth,the strategy of intensification.The simultaneous interpreters are inclined to use more median-value modal operators during diplomatic press conferences.Fifth,the strategy of non-collocation.It is found that the simultaneous interpreters favor the approach of creating new collocations or using rarely seen ones when it comes to China’s policies,actions and conditions.The reasons behind them include the inherent qualities of the language pairs,the energy allocation in simultaneous interpreting and the interpreters’ initiative to project a good image of China.