Influence Of Discourse Structure On Source Text Difficulty Of Consecutive Interpreting

Assessing interpreting difficulty is of great significance to interpreting course design,test development and research.Consecutive interpreting is a major type of interpreting.Its difficulty is determined by source text difficulty,working conditions as well as interpreter competence,among which source text difficulty is the key factor.The literature review shows quantitative measures adopted to gauge source text difficulty of consecutive interpreting mainly include word length and frequency,sentence length and structure as well as information density.However,the adequacy of indicators on the lexical and syntactic level is questioned by many researchers on the ground that they are less relevant to interpreting process,thus making little impact on the difficulty.Information density is a viable measure but it ignores information function.As consecutive interpreting is done based on discourse rather than single word or sentence,it's reasonable to expect text structure to be a crucial factor affecting source text difficulty.Previous studies attribute difficulty to text structure but they fail to explain what text structure is and how it brings cognitive pressure to interpreters.Therefore,this thesis is aimed at: 1)identifying the influence of text structure on source text difficulty in consecutive interpreting based on empirical data;2)analyzing reasons behind the influence.By reviewing interpreting process and quality evaluation standards and drawing on rhetorical structure theory,this study defines text structure as “information hierarchy” and “rhetorical relation”.Rhetorical relation refers to logical relation whose function is to build text coherence.According to cognitive primitives different rhetorical relations contain,they can be categorized as “additive relation” and “causal relation”.In this research,experiments were conducted to verify influence of “information hierarchy” and “rhetorical relation” on source text difficulty.Questionnaires were collected to know the subjective evaluation of source text difficulty by experiment participants.Text analysis was made to explore the reasons of possible influence.Major findings of this study are as follows.First,the depth of information hierarchy doesn't have influence on source text difficulty.That means the deeper structure doesn't necessarily require more cognitive resources.Second,there is significant difference in the influence of rhetorical relations on source text difficulty.On the level of local coherence,the source text dominated by additive relations is more difficult than that dominated by causal relations as causal relations are easier to comprehend and memorize under this circumstance.On the level of global coherence,the source text dominated by additive relations is easier than that dominated by causal relations.As the segments of causal relations are stronger connected and the deduction is involved in the process,the comprehension requires more textual information which are scattered in different parts of the source text,posing a challenge to the interpreter's ability of information analysis and synthesis.