Consecutive Interpreting For Slideshow Presentations From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Nowadays,slides are more and more widely used in communication situations,such as in interpreting scenarios.Speakers use slides to support their presentations,and interpreters need to rely on slides to understand the whole information.How do slides affect interpreters’ information reception and understanding,information restructuring process,and interpreting performance compared to interpreting without slides? It is crucial to explore this topic so as to figure out some coping strategies for practitioners dealing with interpreting situations when speakers use slides.Firstly,by using Zhang Delu’s multimodal theoretical framework and analyzing a remote consecutive interpreting case,this thesis explains the complementary and non-complementary relationship between auditory and visual modality(between what was said in a speech and what was shown on slides)during the interpreting process.In the complementary relationship,slides helped the interpreter gain overall information.In the non-complementary relationship,the interpreter saved time and lessened the pressure of processing multimodal information by omitting and simplifying redundant information.Secondly,the thesis adopted an interview to study the complementary and non-complementary relationship between slides and interpreters’ notes within the visual modality during the interpreter’s information restructuring process.Based on Zhang’s multimodal framework,this thesis also summarizes key elements that make interpreter-mediated communication effective in consecutive interpreting for slideshow presentations at three levels,namely the level of semantic meaning,the level of situations,and the level of culture.Finally,the challenges that slides bring to interpreters are discussed.For example,when the visual modality and auditory modality were unsynchronized,or the information on slides was inconsistent with that conveyed by the speech,the interpreter and the audience found it harder to understand the information.