Redundancy In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation-From The Perspective Of SI As A Communicative Act

With the trend of global economic integration and the entry into the WTO, China has set up frequent exchanges and close cooperation with other countries. Moreover, China has become the center of attention throughout the world for its rapid development. In recent years, many international conferences have been held in China. Under these circumstances, simultaneous interpretation, which is an effective means of cross-cultural communication, has gained wide recognition. On the basis of communication theories, the author in this thesis tries to answer what a simultaneous interpreter should do to analyze and process redundant information, reduce the communication load and make the interpretation comply with the audience's channel capacity under severe time pressure, so that the noise in the information transmission process can be effectively reduced and the smooth communication between the speaker and the audience guaranteed.Simultaneous interpretation is a form of translation activity, in which the interpreter has to do translation while receiving the input information. Moreover, simultaneous interpretation also involves the interaction among the speaker, the interpreter and the audience. Redundancy occurs during the communication process between the speaker and the interpreter, as well as the communication between the interpreter and the audience. Therefore, in order to analyze the redundancy in simultaneous interpretation, the communicative attributes of simultaneous interpretation should be concluded. In the second chapter, the definitions of communication and information, the theories and current research findings at home and abroad have been introduced, including the three influential communication models and the Information Theory. According to the relevant theories of communication and the Gile's Effort Model, the author summarizes the information transmission process of the simultaneous interpretation. Moreover, the author has proposed the communicative attributes of simultaneous interpretation on the basis of Lasswell's 5-W formula. In the simultaneous interpretation, the interpreter plays a dual role as the speaker and the audience and has to manage various tasks at the same time. Different from the consecutive interpretation, simultaneous interpretation mainly involves monological communication. However, the interpreter can monitor the whole communication process through the rendition and the audience's feedback. On the basis of the information transmission process and the communicative attributes of simultaneous interpretation, in the third chapter the author lays emphasis on the introduction of several crucial concepts in the field of communication, as well as the functions of redundancy in simultaneous interpretation. The concepts including communication load, channel capacity and noise are all closely related to redundancy. The efficiency of communication is influenced by the communication load and the channel capacity. The less the communication load is, the lower the efficiency of communication will be. On the contrary, great communication load would lead to communication overload.Accordingly, in simultaneous interpretation, on the one hand, the source language message with a high level of redundancy will reduce the efficiency of communication; on the other hand, the source language message with a low degree of redundancy would challenge the audience's channel capacity. Meanwhile, the communication process in simultaneous interpretation will be inevitably affected by various noises. As a result, the simultaneous interpreters should make fully use of the redundancy and try to be a"buffer"in the communication process, so that the communication load of the target language message and the audience's channel capacity could be in balance.In accordance to the communicative attributes of simultaneous interpretation, the functions of redundancy in simultaneous interpretation and the distinctive characteristics of English and Chinese, the author proposes two fundamental techniques in English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation. The two techniques, namely omission and amplification, can be used to deal with or utilize the redundant information. As two different language systems, English and Chinese have distinct differences at the syntactic and semantic levels. Besides, in the process of simultaneous interpretation, the interpreter should omit or add necessary background and cultural information according to the specific context. All in all, the interpreter should not only learn to combine the two techniques effectively, but also has to apply them flexibly and properly. Either over omission or inadequate amplification will be bound to influence the outcome of simultaneous interpretation.