A Study Of The Factors Influencing The Quality Of Simultancous Intcrprctation

Simultaneous interpretation (SI) is a kind of translation practice in which the interpreter re-expresses the idea and emotion of the original language in the target language almost at the same speed as the speaker's. It is in 1947 when Nazi war criminals were trialed in Nuremberg that the status of SI was established. Compared with consecutive interpretation, simultaneous interpretation, with its advantage of time saving and directness, is popularly applied in international conferences. In the early of 1970s, China returned to the UN, bringing about the rapid elevation of its international prestige and frequent external contacts. Meanwhile, the demand for simultaneous interpreters in China gradually increased. The great demand of the market, in turn, raised high requirements for the quality of SI.However, the studies of SI lag far behind abroad. It is not until 1980s that some interpreters started to write certain explanatory articles on the basis of their own experiences, introspection and other documents. It is worth mentioning that the systematic studies on the factors influencing SI quality are rarely touched on by scholars. In view of that, this thesis attempts to combine the studies of SI with the theories of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics in order to explore the factors that influence the quality of SI. The author begins with analyzing the SI-related theories such as Triangular Model of the Interpretative Theory, Cokly's Model, Gile's Effort Model and Comprehension Model as well. Based on the extensive reading of SI-associated literature of theory and practice, the analysis of SI living examples as well as the interviews with simultaneous interpreters, this thesis explores and elaborates on the major factors influencing the quality of SI and tentatively classifies them into internal and external ones. Internal factors mainly refer to the simultaneous interpreter-related qualities and competences, and they are subdivided into intellectual and non-intellectual ones. Intellectual factors involve such aspects as the interpreter's language competence, extra-linguistic knowledge, anticipation skill, processing capacity as well as time lag adjustment. Non-intellectual factors concern cross-cultural awareness, memory, mentality, physical conditions and team cooperation. External factors mainly focus on two aspects: the speaker and the working conditions. The former includes the speaker's accent and speech content, the speaker's delivery rate and mode, the latter mainly encompasses the location of the booth and the quality of SI equipments. As an explanatory study, this thesis is to answer the following questions: what are the major factors that influence the quality of SI? How do these factors take effect? The final goal of this study is to enhance people's understanding of the nature of SI, which is helpful for simultaneous interpreters to improve their abilities and to explore effective strategies in SI. Furthermore, this study might also guide SI teaching and training as well as SI quality evaluation to develop in the right direction.