An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Hedges On English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

In daily life, people use many hedges such as "I think","I tell you","it can be considered that", and "sort of". These linguistic phenomena may be a challenge for interpreters:for one thing, some hedges have pragmatic functions and interpreters need to capture the intentions conveyed through hedges; for another, hedges that do not carry messages may hinder interpreters from capturing core information. Therefore, it is necessary to study the impact of hedges on interpreters to improve the teaching and training of interpretation. Through an empirical study, this thesis aims to study the impact of hedges on English-Chinese consecutive interpretation.The Author reviewed studies on "fuzziness", definitions and classifications of hedges, hedges in interpreting, and hedges in political contexts. Based on the literature review, the Author chose an operational classification that groups hedges into "approximators" and "shields". The Author also introduced Paul Grice’s four Cooperative Principles and Geoffrey Leech’s six Politeness Principles which constitute the theoretical framework for qualitative analysis.The materials used in this empirical study are from the transcription of a news conference at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on December18,2009and the speaker is the US president Brack Obama. The subjects are six second-year students randomly selected from Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, Beijing Foreign Studies University.The result of this experiment indicates that hedges have no significant influence on the general performance of English-Chinese interpreters or the degree of fidelity in their interpreting.Through qualitative analysis, the author discovered that the subjects were relatively insensitive to adaptors; prone to ignoring the approximators following numbers; and likely to use plausible shields casually, misinterpreting the remark.