Syntactic Priming Effect In E-C Interpreting Of Passive Sentences And Relative Clauses By Chinese Student Interpreters

In the interpreting process, the interpreter is engaged simultaneously in a series ofactivities involving source language recognition, code-switching, information retention,and target language output. This poses great challenge to the interpreter’s limitedcognitive and memory resources. Under such great pressure, the interpreter issometimes prone to preserve the sentence structure in the source language ininterpreting in order to alleviate cognitive load. Although this phenomenon has beenwidely observed, so far there hasn’t been any systematic investigation into this issue.Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, the present study exploresChinese student interpreters’ treatment of English passive structures and relativeclauses in E-C interepreting.34postgraduate student interpreters participated in thisstudy. They were asked to sight-interpret an excerpt from a speech and their recordingswere transcribed for further analysis. The results showed that these student interpreterstended to preserve the original syntactic structures in interpreting both English passivesentences and relative clauses, exhibiting syntactic priming effect. The paper thusconcludes that code-switching in interpreting is subject to the influence of syntacticpriming. The paper then discusses this effect in relation to interpreting, which isfollowed by a discussion of its pedagogical implications.